Sixteenth-century Europe Research Articles

Biblical nationalism and the sixteenth-century states

The emergence of Protestant nations in sixteenth-century Europe was driven by the sudden rediscovery of biblical nationalism, a political model that did not separate the religious from the political. Biblical nationalism was new because pre-Reformation Europeans encountered the Hebrew Bible through paraphrases and abridgments. Full-text Bibles revealed a programmatic nationalism backed by unmatched authority as the word of God to readers primed by Reformation theology to seek models in the Bible for the reform of their own societies. Sixteenth-century biblical nationalism was the unintended side effect of a Reformation intended to save souls.

License to Kill: Assassination and the Politics of Murder in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England

If we understand “assassinations” to be the targeted killing of public figures by people who believe themselves to be acting in the public interest, then the history of modern assassination begins in late sixteenth-century Europe. Prompted by the observation that the word itself was new to late sixteenth-century English, this article examines the altered scope and significance of political killings in post-Reformation England. Individuals from a broad range of backgrounds came to think themselves authorized to shape their polity by killing their leaders. Their efforts, along with authorities’ responses to such plots, speak to an increasingly participatory political culture. Murder had long been a political tool; but as politics changed, this article argues, so too did the nature and meanings of political killings.

Abraham Ortelius’s Library Reconstructed

It is well known that during his lifetime Ortelius gradually filled his house with substantial collections of various forms of art. He also accumulated a large library of printed books, books with maps, loose maps, portolan charts, manuscript maps and manuscript texts. The aim in this article is to arrive at an estimate of the size of his library at the time of his death in 1598. The focus is on his maps and books, information for which comes primarily from Ortelius himself. Unusually for the time, Ortelius recorded his cartographical sources and the books and authors he consulted for his maps and writings in a Catalogus auctorum, but much can also be discovered from the texts on the verso of the maps in the Theatrum orbis terrarum, and from the Synonymia and Thesauri, his correspondence and the ledgers in the Plantin Moretus Museum, in which Ortelius’s transactions with Christophe Plantin were recorded. Some of Ortelius’s library books, identified by his signature, have survived. From all these sources it is estimated that Ortelius owned about 5,965 maps and 3,514 books written by about 2,892 authors, making his library one of the largest, if not the largest, private collection of books and maps in sixteenth-century Europe.

Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Botany and Anatomy

Rather than use “the book of nature” in a metaphorical sense, Sachiko Kusukawa makes a compelling case that illustrated books of anatomy and botany similarly directed attention to material structures of nature in sixteenth-century Europe. Showing that illustrated books stand in a complex relation to the practices they record, she argues in this beautifully produced volume that authors adopted engraved images to define “nature” as a material form of evidence in distinctly modern ways. Kusukawa shows how the assembly of books restored the premium ancient writers placed on “seeing for oneself [autopsia]” in ways “integral to the Renaissance enterprise of reviving classical knowledge” (125). She argues that images in botany and anatomy texts after 1530 delineated natural structures both to resolve debates of translation and to synthesize observations by which natural structures “became visible” (257) in ways independent from stylistic shifts of art. Kusukawa demonstrates that naturalists defended their right to illustrate their work with the fixed outlines, volumetric shading, and delineation of wood and copper engravings, thus mediating their first-hand observations through printed form. Her argument extends the classic thesis of William Ivins that “exactly reproducible pictorial statement[s]” rationalized nature (Prints and Visual Communication, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969, 23–24, 46). Her attention to how authors integrated images to create arguments rooted in observations unpacks Ivins's claim and extends his argument in at least three ways: by demonstrating the investment of a northern European milieu in securing privileges for prints to make knowledge claims in their illustrated books; by showing the value of the precision with which engraved images could embody synthetic observations; by highlighting the common attention to preserving lifelike design both in commentary devoted to botanical images and anatomists' attention to deploying lifelike images of natural bodily structures.

Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans by Carina L. Johnson (review)

Reviewed by: Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans by Carina L. Johnson Yuen-Gen Liang Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans. By Carina L. Johnson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 340 pp. $99.00 (cloth). Carina Johnson’s new book analyzes how the transformation of cultural outlooks during the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation changed Europeans’ understandings of Ottoman Turks and Mexicans. In the early sixteenth century, ideas of European superiority were not “fixed.” Europeans viewed differences they ascribed to Ottoman Turks and Mexican Indians as fitting within an acceptable range of diversity manifested by human communities. As the Reformations unfolded in the sixteenth century, however, Europeans created a regime of exclusion based on restricted notions of pure faith and European identity. Both Protestants and Catholics, waging [End Page 690] battles over the boundaries of true religion and seeking purity and standardization of belief and practice, devalued Turkish and Mexican identity and religion, often labeling both their material culture and their beliefs as “idolatrous.” Johnson locates the subject of her study in the Habsburg realm, which, in the sixteenth century, united parts of central, northern, and southern Europe in at times closer and other times looser union, and whose span reached to the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire and Central and South America. Ties between members of the Habsburg dynasty enabled courtiers and officials, as well as information and artifacts, to circulate from Mexico to Vienna. Europeans distant from the frontlines of military and cultural encounters still grappled with the meeting of different peoples and their customs and beliefs. Six chapters arranged into two parts, “Categories of Inclusion” and “Experiments of Exclusion,” constitute Johnson’s book. Despite the division, each chapter begins by addressing cultural forms that were initially inclusive and continues by discussing how these forms devolved into exclusion as Reformation forces reshaped cultural values. Johnson begins by examining fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century cosmographies and ethnographies that describe other communities through relatively neutral categories of geography, social organization, and economic production. Ethnographers examined religion more as practice, which in many cases was analogized with Christian customs, rather than spotlighting differences in belief as intrinsically heretical. The resurgent concept of universal monarchy, moreover, made the case that a Christian emperor could rule over Jewish, Muslim, and pagan peoples. Indeed, Emperor Charles V supported the Hafsid dynasty’s struggle against Ottomans for control of Tunis, and he hosted both Hafsid princes and Mexica notables, who received titles of nobility, stipends, and ceremonial offices, at his court. Aztec and later Inca treasures of precious metals and stones as well as artistically fashioned ornaments were shipped to court. Considered as the tribute of conquered territories, they were incorporated into the Habsburgs’ sacral treasure, which included Christian relics and regalia that served as symbols of imperial sovereignty and legitimacy. Johnson opens part 2 by returning to ethnographies that, by the mid sixteenth century, distinguish between Christians observing the pure faith and a host of non-European Christians and non-Christians including Ethiopians, Jews, Muslims, and Indians. Conflated together, these latter peoples were oftentimes considered to practice odious customs influenced by the devil. The three chapters of this section then focus more closely on German perceptions of “the Turk,” shaped [End Page 691] by the Ottoman Empire’s expansion into central Europe in the mid 1520s. On this volatile frontier, Christians and Muslims raided each other’s territories and took captives. Protestant pamphleteers, many of whom had once looked upon icon-adverse Turks as the scourge of unreformed Christianity, reported the suffering of Christian captives and claimed that they were subject to a variety of physical and sexual abuses at the hands of their immoral captors. Printed accounts of an Ottoman diplomatic mission to the election of Emperor Ferdinand’s son Maximilian as king of the Romans in 1562 further set Ottomans apart as the ambassador was recognized to be a Polish renegade; the gifts he brought suggested the exotic, and his presence at a stage of the Holy Roman Empire’s orderly succession process brought to mind the fratricide, parricide, and even filiocide that at times played roles in Ottoman dynastic succession. The book...

The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492 by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein (review)

Reviewed by: The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492 by Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein Joshua Holo The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492 Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. 340 pp. To grasp the value and challenge of The Chosen Few, one must first appreciate its disciplinary rootedness in economic history, the sole conceptual lens through which Botticini and Eckstein examine the very worthwhile, if broad, research question that drives them. The Chosen Few sets out to explain nothing less than how the Jews have succeeded as a dispersed urban minority for over a millennium. Specifically, it reduces that success to Judaism’s [End Page 151] demand for literacy, a commodity with costs and benefits that balance out very favorably in the money-based economies born during the Middle Ages. I say “reduce” advisedly, for a truly macroscopic history cannot avoid being reductive, and it risks, by extension, falling into a twilight genre, neither popular nor properly scholarly. If, however, a sweeping argument can navigate competing theories and resist gross oversimplification, it can still propose a useful organizing principle. All told, The Chosen Few succeeds in illustrating the centrality of literacy to Jewish success, but it unnecessarily, almost petulantly, insists on the exclusive primacy of literacy over others endogenous, multilayered factors, such as ethnic solidarity and dispersion. Ultimately, though sometimes blinkered, The Chosen Few deserves serious attention for raising and, largely compellingly, answering a fertile question of Jewish history. To begin, Botticini and Eckstein discern the origin of Jewish literacy in the rise of Rabbinic Judaism. Facing the destruction of the Temple, the rabbis committed the Jewish destiny to the text-based fulfillment of the divine covenant, concomitantly elevating literacy to a religious obligation. This obligation, though enacted in the mid-first century c.e., was implemented after the third-century redaction of the Mishnah. In the agricultural context of the third to seventh centuries, this resource-intensive, religious requirement weakened the Jews and diminished their numbers, because they were, in the main, farmers for whom literacy had no parallel, practical benefits. However, with the rise of Islam, urbanism and, later, the Commercial Revolution, the Jews’ requirement for literacy proved eminently useful and strengthened their position in emerging commercial and money-based economies. The middle chapters follow the Jews’ peregrinations to Europe and their settling into the niches of mercantilism and moneylending, on the strength of their literacy and numeracy. The book ends in the sixteenth century in Europe (leaving the post-Expulsion story for the next book) and at the thirteenth-century Mongol invasions in the Middle East, which destroyed the urban economies of the Islamic world. Dense (to humanists, impenetrable) mathematical annexes to chapters 4 and 6 complement illustrative numerical tables throughout. As a rule, Botticini and Eckstein affirm their thesis well; but they exclude other theses poorly. Though Jewish literacy clearly owes much to Rabbinic Judaism, The Chosen Few ignores the possibility that the rabbis and their penchant for literacy may not have, in fact, exerted much direct influence over Judaism and Jewish farmers, either way, during the pre-Islamic [End Page 152] centuries (cf. Ra’anan Boustan’s concise outline of influential arguments by Daniel Boyarin and Seth Schwartz, among others, in his review of Paula Fredriksen’s Augustine and the Jews, JQR 99, no. 1 [2009]: 74-77). Perhaps more troublingly, The Chosen Few is generally allergic to a more textured (and less punchy) historical tapestry of the coincident and aggregate forces that might have engendered Jewish urbanism. The authors prefer to divide and conquer, picking off individual arguments as insufficient explanations on their own, as if one needed a single-factored solution in the first place. For example, while Botticini and Eckstein convincingly illustrate the fact of disproportionate Jewish depopulation during the agricultural era, from the first to seventh centuries, they scorn the explanatory power of the lingering demographic effects of revolts and riots. Worse, they argue e silentio to dismiss low fertility; if low fertility “had been a major problem … one would expect it to have … found its way into the Talmud.” The Chosen Few reverts to conversion, spurred by the onus...

Japanese Travellers in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Edited by Derek Massarella, translated by Joseph F. Moran, (Series III, vol. 25). pp. 481. London, Ashgate for the Hakluyt Society, 2012.

Japanese Travellers in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Edited by Derek Massarella, translated by Joseph F. Moran, (Series III, vol. 25). pp. 481. London, Ashgate for the Hakluyt Society, 2012. - Volume 23 Issue 3

Christoph Prescher – riiklik ajalehekirjutaja ja uudistekaupmees 1680. aastate alguse Riias

Christoph Prescher – official newswriter and information merchant in Riga in the early 1680s The profession of a newswriter or a news transmitter (Zeitungsschreiber in German), who collected and sold information, was born in the context of expanding and intensifying postal networks during the sixteenth century in Europe. Professional newswriters (also called Zeitunger, Novellanten, or Avisenschreiber in the German-speaking areas) were active in the market towns situated in the most important junctions of postal roads. Information became an object of trade in early modern Europe – the public sale of news or news mediums became a widespread business that proceeded, for example, in the cultural area of Germany or the Netherlands on private initiative and was a supplementary activity to the person’s main profession. Countries with a strong central power, including the Swedish realm, gave the information business to certain persons who were under the control of the state. This article observes the changes in the news market of Riga in the beginning of the 1680s. In 1680, Christoph Prescher was assigned as the official newswriter of Riga. He was an official acting under the royal privilege, and he had been granted the exclusive position for issuing a newspaper. As the official newswriter, Prescher diff ers from the average early modern newspaper merchant acting on private initiative as the latter was involved in the sale of information as a supplementary business. This article discusses whether the royal privilege itself was enough to fulfil the task successfully and to earn a living. As the official newswriter, Prescher had to face economic difficulties which he tried to overcome by finding new readers outside Riga and Livland and by advertising his newspaper in Tallinn. However, one year aft er the first issue of the newspaper, the financial difficulties had not dissolved. To exempt himself from the restricted role of a newswriter, Prescher tried to find supplementary outputs: he offered to carry out the restructuring of the Riga postal office (which had been stripped of the right to trade with news), as both hoped to restore the normal situation in effect prior to the year 1680. It seems that the problems of the official newswriter were solved by the end of the 1680s, when the newspaper had developed a large number of subscribers in the provinces of Estland, Livland, and Ingermanland, in addition to the readers in Riga. KEYWORDS: Baltic history, Swedish history, early modern period, communication, newspapers, Riga, 17th century. KAAREL VANAMÖLDER (b. 1981) is a Lecturer of Estonian history at the Narva College, University of Tartu. Correspondence: Narva College, University of Tartu, Raekoja plats 2, Narva 20307, Estonia. E-mail: kaarel.vanamolder@ut.ee

Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans by Carina L. Johnson (review)

Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans by Carina L. Johnson (review)

Sixteenth-Century Italian, French, Spanish and English Language Learning Material. A Bibliographical Study

This bibliographical study offers a list of the first printed language manuals in Western Europe expressly designed to teach a particular foreign language to speakers of a particular tongue. Hence, the study lists references to sixteenth-century grammars, dictionaries and language handbooks with the possible linguistic combinations of Italian, French, Spanish and English, the first three being the most popular modern languages in sixteenth-century Western Europe and hence the most representative ones offering an insight into the foreign language learning map of the time. The bibliographical study is preceded by an introduction to the manner in which foreign tongues were taught and learned in the early modern period, and is completed by a selection of references to secondary sources that have been researched on each linguistic combination.

Amerigo Vespucci and His Alleged Awareness of America as a Separate Land Mass

ABSTRACT The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci is widely believed to have been the first European to realize on his third voyage (May 1501 to September 1502) that America was a separate land mass, unconnected to Asia and completely surrounded by water, a communis opinio refuted in the present article. Close analysis of the geographical terms used in Vespucci’s letters, and their comparison with early sixteenth-century printed cosmographies, suggest that, on the contrary, Vespucci regarded the newly discovered land mass as a southern extension of the Asian continent. Also discussed are Matthias Ringmann’s 1507 Cosmographiae Introductio and Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, whose depiction of America as a separate land mass, allegedly based on Vespucci, paved the way for a concept that could not have been recognized as geographical truth in early sixteenth-century Europe.

Francisco de Enzinas, a Reformationminded humanist with a vernacular dream

In sixteenth-century Western Europe there was widespread debate as to whether it was permissible, or even desirable, that the laity read the Bible in the vernacular and whether the Bible might be translated into various national languages. Under the influence of the humanistic ideas of Desiderius Erasmus, several young Spaniards came to Leuven to complete their studies, one of whom was the Spanish humanist, Francisco de Enzinas, whose chief objective was to provide a Spanish translation of Scripture. This article will show that in an eventful life, but cut short, and during which he eventually did admit allegiance to the Reformation, Enzinas was only able to partially achieve this goal. In 1543 he published a Spanish translation of the New Testament and some books of the Old Testament.

The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Erin A. Sadlack.

<i>The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe</i>. Erin A. Sadlack.

Erin A. Sadlack. The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Queenship and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 278. $80.00 (cloth).

Erin A. Sadlack. The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Queenship and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 278. $80.00 (cloth). - Volume 51 Issue 3

:The French Queen's Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe

:<i>The French Queen's Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe</i>

The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment (review)

Reviewed by: The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment Graeme Garrard (bio) Christian Thorne . The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. xii+377pp. US$49.95. ISBN 978-0-674-03522-5. This lengthy book is a reconstruction and analysis of selected "anti-foundational" texts and ideas from antiquity and early modernity. Its basic aim is to demonstrate that a long tradition of Pyrrhonian scepticism, which began in ancient Greece and was revived in sixteenth-century Europe, is actually politically reactionary in both its intentions and its effects, despite sharing many formal similarities and argumentative strategies with contemporary "Left anti-foundationalism." Thorne's general conclusion is that the critique of knowledge that lies at the heart of such scepticism can be stylistically innovative and radical without necessarily being socially or politically subversive. The moral of his story is that, although recent anti-foundational intellectual movements [End Page 539] such as critical theory, poststructuralism, and neopragmatism are almost uniformly radical or "progressive" in their politics, their sceptical antecedents in the early modern period were anything but. Hence Thorne's conclusion that scepticism "simply is a form-the form of antimony or argument/counterargument. Scepticism aims to be nothing but that form, without any philosophical insides" (314). Pyrrhonian scepticism, named after the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho and closely associated with his follower Sextus Empiricus, is the view that we ought to suspend judgment about what to believe because we cannot know what is true and what is false. This cognitive "suspension" (Greek epokhē, ἐποχή does not deny the possibility of knowledge, since such a denial would itself be a claim to knowledge. Rather, it favours the wholesale abandonment of the quest for understanding itself, which is held to be intellectually honest and mentally liberating. An influential Latin translation of Sextus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism was published in 1569, and played an important part in the revival of Pyrrhonist scepticism in early modern Europe. A typical example of this can be seen in Michel de Montaigne's influential and endearing Essais (1580), to which Thorne devotes two long, critical chapters of his book. According to Thorne, a generalized scepticism about knowledge pulls the epistemological rug out from under all beliefs, including those that would serve as a basis for criticizing the status quo, leaving would-be reformers and radicals with no rational answer to the question "why change?" In the context of sixteenth-century France, Montaigne's Pyrrhonian doubt about knowledge became "an ideological weapon of the absolutist state" (85-86). By subverting the French Catholic State's subverters, Pyrrhonism amounted to a "skeptical absolutism" (101) and "authoritarian pragmatism" (61) that in practice propped up the conservative status quo, which was the substantive political purpose of Montaigne's formally innovative Essais. Also, if, as anti-foundationalists claim, all beliefs are contingent and contextual, with no universal or objective basis, then our adherence to the particular beliefs that we happen to hold is purely a matter of socialization and habituation, in which case you should not "waste your time hammering out sophistical arguments or passing ungainly legislation. Control memory. Condition loyalties. Police the imagination. Train the children" (84). For sceptics, epistemological disagreement is rationally irresolvable, forever threatening to spill over into the political and religious spheres with catastrophic results, as it did in sixteenth-century France and seventeenth-century England. This threat led Montaigne to seek unity, "not philosophical unity, but rather some site of local homogeneity from which variety can be expelled. This is a scepticism of the loyalty oath and the witch-hunt" (107). [End Page 540] The superficially moderate and sceptical Montaigne emerges here as a close ideological relative of the political absolutist Thomas Hobbes, who also viewed philosophy as inimical to political order and sought to isolate the state from knowledge and argument "so that sovereignty can operate unimpeded" (208). Early eighteenth-century Tory satirists such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe continued this sceptical assault on philosophy and knowl edge (the Counter-Enlightenment of the book's title), and for much the same reason: "it necessarily leads to social and political disorder" (250). They entered the new public sphere of print culture in order to subvert it...

Erin A. Sadlack. The French Queen's Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Queenship and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xi +266 pp. $80. ISBN: 978–0–230–62030–8.

Erin A. Sadlack. The French Queen's Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Queenship and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xi +266 pp. $80. ISBN: 978–0–230–62030–8. - Volume 65 Issue 1

What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?*

AbstractWhen Hamlet reflects on the charged power of the tragic theater, the figure who haunts his imagination is Hecuba, Queen of Troy, whose tragedy came to define the genre in sixteenth-century Europe. As a bereaved mourner who seeks revenge, Hecuba offers a female version of Hamlet. Yet even while underscoring her tragic power, Shakespeare simultaneously establishes a new model of tragic protagonist, challenging the period’s longstanding identification of tragedy with women. In exploring why both Hamlet and Shakespeare are preoccupied with Hecuba, this article argues that ignoring the impact of Greek plays in sixteenth-century England has left a gap in our understanding of early modern tragedy. Attending to Hecuba highlights Shakespeare’s innovations to a genre conventionally centered on female grief. In invoking Hecuba as an icon of tragedy, Shakespeare both reflects on and transforms women’s place in the genre.

Ezechiel Sangmeister’s Way of Life in Greater Pennsylvania

The Reformation ran headlong into the Enlightenment between the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. The most radical byproducts of sixteenth-century Europe’s religious reform movements settled in this colony hailed by Enlightenment thinkers as a beacon of toleration. Nothing probed the parameters of that toleration as pointedly as the celibate sect that established the Ephrata Cloister on the banks of Cocalico Creek. Leben und Wandel, the autobiography of Ezechiel Sangmeister, offers historians the most detailed perspective on the daily life and culture surrounding that community in Pennsylvania and flowing south down the Shenandoah.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors