Sixteenth Century

In April 1616 Hugo Grotius, in his capacity as head of a delegation from the States of Holland to the Amsterdam city council, treated, or subjected, the council to what Jonathan Israel in his 'The Dutch Republic. Its Rise Greatness and Fall 1477-1806...pp.439-40, has described ...

At a time when historians seem all too often to have lost confidence in their craft and turned to other branches of knowledge for inspiration, Erik Midelfort has written a very historical book. A history of madness in sixteenth-century Germany brilliantly demonstrates how much an accomplished historian can achieve. While Midelfort is by no means oblivious to the insights other disciplines offer-he listens to the "engaged and emphatic ethnography" of Nancy Scheper-Hughes and heeds the words of the philosopher Ian Hacking on multiple personality disorder'-his analysis rests on historical methods. Like Carlo Ginzburg, Midelfort fashions a history that is "really dead", one that stresses the strangeness of the sixteenth century (without exaggerating it) and that accepts the past as unique. He, moreover, rejects Foucault's "moral tone poem" as not "of much assistance" (pp. 7, 9), and prefers instead to do what historians are best-suited to do: exploit extant sources critically and creatively. Midelfort prefers the word "madness" precisely because it is an anachronism and because this vague term "well serves the purposes of an empirical historian" (p. 11). While Midelfort shuns the dreadful twins of retro-diagnosis and biological reductionism, he does not fear to accept that the perspective of almost four hundred years may well cast light on the experiences of distant times. The results ' Saints, scholars, and schizophrenics: mental illness in rural Ireland, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1979; Rewriting the soul: multiple personality and the sciences of memory, Princeton University Press, 1995.

This essay offers a new reading of Diego Velazquez's Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1618) by relating it to religious discourse in the artist's native Seville. Through an analysis of previously unstudied Sevillian writings, this article argues that the painting's compositional structure entreats the beholder to use the corporeal register of the foreground as a means of entry into the spiritual register of the background scene. A consideration of contemporary discussions concerning the interrelation between the art of memory and devotion elucidates the function of Velazquez's picture-within-a picture as a mnemonic device that reminds the viewer to heed his or her duties to Christ, even amid life's toils. Establishing the nexus between text and image, these writings are treated not simply as sources for Velazquez's work, but as tools for reconstructing the religious milieu to which the artist contributed.

... drugs were responsible for the strange confessions witches gave; that illnesses like rabies and porphyria created legends of werewolf-witches. ... However, numerous witch-hunters tested these ointments and not a single one was ever found to have an unusual effect. ...

Book Reviews / Comptes rendus / 73 viewer's relation to the figure. This idea, like several others presented here, is ingenious but needs to be more fully worked out. In the place of this critical elaboration we get half-baked applications of Michael Fried's concepts of "absorption" and "theatricality" and of Freud's concept of dream wish-fulfillment.

Michael Kubovy, an experimental psychologist, recounts the lively history of the invention of perspective in the fifteenth century, and shows how, as soon as the invention spread, it was used to achieve subtle and fascinating aesthetic effects. A clear presentation of the fundamental concepts of perspective and the reasons for its effectiveness, drawing on the latest laboratory research on how people perceive, leads into the development of a new theory to explain why Renaissance artists such as Leonardo and Mantegna used ...

List of Illustrations xv 24 Sir Nathaniel Bacon, 'Self-portrait' c.1625 (Gorhambury Collection/Earl of Verulam 25 Plan of a typical sixteenth-century gentry house 285 26 J. Carlile 'Sir Justinian Isham and the Carlile family hunting the stag', mid-seventeenth century (Courtauld Institute of Art) 27 Sir Thomas Lucy III, d.l640, on his great horse: detail from monument, Charlecote Church, Warwickshire 293

Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme a single period. The problems encountered in his work on the Renaissance led him logically to thinkers of subsequent ages, such as Leibniz and even his own teacher, Gaston Bachelard. Moreover, his intellectual curiosity rendered Margolin particularly qualified to study Renaissance scholars that were active in a variety of fields, such as Charles de Bovelles and Girolamo Cardano. He also wrote on travel in the Renaissance and the history of eyeglasses, to mention only a very few topics. First and last, however, Margolin has always been, and will continue to be, an Erasmus scholar. His profound understanding and appreciation of Erasmus may well be based on a certain natural affinity. It has found expression in monographs, topical essays as well as editions and translations of Erasmus' writings. His recent volume Érasme, précepteur de l'Europe is ample proof that his devotion to Erasmus and Erasmianism has not diminished and that we may expect many more insights in the years to come.

A new history illuminates the Society of Jesus in its first century from the perspective of those who knew it best: the early Jesuits themselves.

The Society of Jesus was established in 1540. In the century that followed, thousands sought to become Jesuits and pursue vocations in religious service, teaching, and missions. Drawing on scores of unpublished biographical documents housed at the Roman Jesuit Archive, Camilla Russell illuminates the lives of those who joined the Society, building together a religious and cultural presence that remains influential the world over.

Tracing Jesuit life from the Italian provinces to distant missions, Russell sheds new light on the impact and inner workings of the Society. The documentary record reveals a textual network among individual members, inspired by Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. The early Jesuits took stock of both quotidian and spiritual experiences in their own records, which reflect a community where the worldly and divine overlapped. Echoing the Society’s foundational writings, members believed that each Jesuit’s personal strengths and inclinations offered a unique contribution to the whole—an attitude that helps explain the Society’s widespread appeal from its first days.

Focusing on the Jesuits’ own words, Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy offers a new lens on the history of spirituality, identity, and global exchange in the Renaissance. What emerges is a kind of genetic code—a thread connecting the key Jesuit works to the first generations of Jesuits and the Society of Jesus as it exists today.

Publication Date: 14/12/2021 - Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press - 256 pp. ISBN 9780674261129

CFP: Beyond the Microcosm: The Impact of Confraternities on the Civic Sphere.

Since the formation of the Society for Confraternity Studies, which celebrates it 30th anniversary in 2019, the subject of Confraternity Studies has moved on from what Konrad Eisenbichler once described as an “invisible history” to become an authoritative sub-field of late medieval and early modern scholarship. Accordingly, in order to encourage a discourse that places confraternities at the center of essential historical developments rather than at their periphery, we invite proposals for papers that explore the amplitude and impact of lay sodalities in Europe, the Americas, the East and Asia in relation to the activities of wider late medieval and early modern society. Papers might focus on, but are not limited to the following topics:
• The reach and range of lesser traversed sodalities. For example, slave confraternities.
• The relationships between lay companies and non members. For instance, confraternal liaisons with artisans, food merchants or second-hand clothes sellers.
• Confratelli and consorelle entrusted with public service, healthcare and the custody of people or objects.
• The influence of confraternal ritual and recreation on urban spaces.
• Individual and familial investment in lay companies in order to garner social influence or to gain political power.
• Associations between the devotional lives of non-clerics and the ordained: how these affinities played out in rituals, drama and music.
• The impact of art, architecture and ephemera commissioned by confraternities on public spaces and/or the popular conscience.
Papers should concentrate on confraternal activities between 1300 and 1700. We are however, also particularly interested in proposals that discuss retrospectively, the value of studies that have emerged since the conference in 1989 and consider how Confraternity Studies will advance into the twenty-first century.
Proposals should include the presenter’s name, academic affiliation, email, the paper title (no longer than 15 words), the abstract of the paper (no longer than 150 words), a brief academic C.V. (not longer than 300 words), and a series of key-words that suit the presentation. Please be sure all nine (7) categories of information are clearly provided.
Please submit your proposal to Dr Samantha J.C. Hughes-Johnson at [email protected] by 1 August 2018.

La vie de Marie Magdaleine, par personnages. Genève: Librairie Droz, 1986. 115p. Edition critique de Jacques Chocheyras et Graham A. Runnalls. Longtemps restée dans l'ombre, la version dramatisée de La vie de Marie Magdaleine, datée de 1605 et publiée à Lyon par Pierre Délaye, se voit de nos jours ressuscitée grâce à la toute récente édition critique proposée par Jacques Chocheyras et Graham A. Runnals. Ecrit par un auteur anonyme, ce drame de 1922 vers met en scène, selon l'Incipit: "la vie de Marie Magdaleine, contenant plusieurs beaux miracles, comment elle, son frère le Lazare, et Marthe sa soeur vindrent à Marseille, et comme elle convertit le Duc et la Duchesse; et est a XXII personnages."

Under the pressure of industrial demands following the discovery of South African diamonds, gemology became a science during the late nineteenth century by combining morphological mineralogy with mineral physics and chemistry. However, it underwent an empirical, pre-to semiscientific period during the Renaissance, when market novelties required development in gemological knowledge. Pliny's Naturalis Historia (1469) was the reference treatise on gemstones among scholars, but it was the Italian translation of this work by Landino in 1476 that made gem studies grow. Indeed, while scholarly mineralogy developed through Latin texts, practical arts related to minerals developed through light handbooks in the new European languages. In Italy, the most active trading center at that time, where luxury goods were brought to be set in gold and distributed to all of Europe, most gem traders possibly understood some Latin, but certainly their providers did not, nor their customers. This is why the first original Renaissance book on gems, Speculum lapidum, by Leonardi , did not enjoy popularity until it was translated into Italian by Dolce in 1565. Similarly, Barbosa's accounts of travel to gem-producing India (1516) became known only after Ramusio translated them in 1554. Among gemological contributions in Italian, the most farsighted ones are Mattioli's translation of Dioscorides' De materia medica (1544) and Cellini's Dell'oreficeria (1568). Moreover, three manuscripts did not reach the stage of being printed: Vasolo's Le miracolose virtù delle pietre pretiose (1577), Costanti's Questo è 'l libro lapidario (1587), and del Riccio's Istoria delle pietre (1597). They survived, however, to help clarify gem interests and activities by the merchant class in the transitional time from the Renaissance to the Baroque. Then, Italy lost its top position in culture and trade, and a Fleming, A.B. de Boot, wrote the treatise that summed up the available knowledge on gems at that time (1609).

na te lezen. Hans Smit van het Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis ben ik dankbaar voor zijn hulp en kennis en voor het mogen gebruiken van de database van de correspondentie Willem van Oranje nog voor deze voor het publiek opengesteld was. Het personeel van de archieven die ik heb bezocht was immer behulpzaam en geduldig. Dit geldt met name voor het Nationaal Archief en het Koninklijk Huisarchief, beide te Den Haag en het Algemeen Rijksarchief te Brussel. Dr. Peter Schiffer van het Hohenlohe Zentralarchiv maakte me wegwijs in het belangrijke en omvangrijke archief op het kasteel te Neuenstein. Mijn ouders Luderis Swart en Valerie van Dijk, benevens mijn zus Ingrid en mijn zwager Patrick dank ik voor hun steun, vertrouwen en aanmoediging. Ik draag dit boek op aan mijn grootouders, Johannes Swart, Grietje Koops, Menno Gerhardus van Dijk en Evelyn Lavinia Black. Voor hen is oorlog meer geweest dan slechts geschiedenis. Glossarium Adelborst: oorspronkelijk waarschijnlijk een edelman die als gewoon soldaat te voet diende. Omstreeks het begin van de Opstand was echter geen van de adelborsten nog van adel. De 'edelluiden', zoals ze ook wel werden aangeduid, waren toen ofwel onderbevelhebbers binnen een vendel, ofwel een synoniem voor de rondassiers, de met zwaard en rondas (schild) uitgeruste soldaten. Archer: oorspronkelijk lichter gepantserde lansier uit een ordonnantiebende, aangeleverd door de hommes d'arme maar meestal niet van adel. Tegen de jaren 1550 week de uitrusting nauwelijks nog af van die van de hommes d'arme. In de beginfase van de Opstand werden de archers mogelijk bereden haakbusschutters. Escuadre: onderafdeling van een compagnie voetvolk van omstreeks dertig man. Foerier: elk vendel had een van deze functionarissen, die met de kwartiermeester voor het regiment uittrok en de bevelhebbers en soldaten van zijn vendel de hun toegedeelde kwartieren aanwees. In de landsknechtenorganisatie maandelijks gekozen door de soldaten. Na afschaffing hiervan door de kapitein benoemd. Gendarme: synoniem voor homme d'arme. Hoerenweifel: een ervaren krijgsman, meestal niet meer geschikt voor gewone dienst, die in de landsknechtenorganisatie was belast met de leiding van en het toezicht op de legertros. Homme d'arme: gepantserde, doorgaans adellijke lansier uit een ordonnantiebende. Tot de jaren 1540 geheel gepantserd, evenals zijn paard. In dit decennium verdween het pantser voor het paard en het beenpantser onder de knie. Korporaal: bevelhebber van een escuadre, dat daarom ook wel korporaalschap heette. Lanspassaat: onderbevelhebber van een korporaal. Malefijtsrecht: het keizerlijke strafrecht van de landsknechten. Ordonnantiebende: een door de Bourgondische hertog Karel de Stoute in 1471 opgerichte permanente compagnie krijgslieden, samengesteld uit edellieden met gevolg. Ordonnantiebendes bestonden aanvankelijk uit zowel voetvolk als ruiterij, maar mogelijk al vanaf 1473 slechts uit ruiters. Vanaf 1545 waren er in de 12 Nederlanden veertien of vijftien, die op papier bestonden uit dertig, veertig of vijftig gendarmes, met een dubbel aantal archers. Prima plana: de eerste pagina van een monsterrol, waarop het kader van een compagnie stond vermeld. Gebruikt als synoniem voor compagniesstaf. Rotmeester: in de landsknechtenorganisatie door de soldaten zelf gekozen aanvoerder van een rot van tien man. Na de afschaffing van de landsknechtenorganisatie in de Nederlanden nog wel gebruikt als synoniem voor korporaal. Sergeant: de opvolgers van de weifel na afschaffing van de landsknechtenorganisatie. Elk vendel had er twee, die door de kapitein benoemd werden. Een van de twee heette de oudste sergeant en had de taken van de veldwevel overgenomen. Vaan: een compagnie ruiterij. Veldwevel: oorspronkelijk een regimentsambt, maar vanaf ca. 1550 had elk vendel landsknechten een door kolonel of kapitein benoemde veldwevel. Zijn voornaamste taak was het opstellen en oefenen van de mars-en slagorde, waartoe hij moest kunnen rekenen. Vendel: een compagnie voetvolk. Voerder: in de landsknechtenorganisatie beschikte elk vendel over een van deze maandelijks door de soldaten zelf gekozen functionarissen. Hij trok met de voerders van de andere vendels voor het regiment uit en leidde zijn vendel naar de kampplaats. De voerder vertegenwoordigde de belangen van de gewone soldaten, met als belangrijkste taken namens hen in een rechtbank zitting nemen en advies geven inzake juridische kwesties. Weifel: deze steunde in de landsknechtenorganisatie de veldwevel bij het opstellen en oefenen van de mars-en slagorde en bij het indelen en controleren van de wacht. Verder was hij betrokken bij de verdeling van proviand en munitie en actief als bemiddelaar tussen de gewone soldaten en hun superieuren, vooral de kapitein. Elk vendel had twee weifels, die maandelijks gekozen werden door de soldaten zelf.

Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli and its workshop carved some marble portraits and fountains between 1539 and 1541 that were sent from Genoa into Spain as diplomatic gifts. Some of them were also intended to play an important role as part of the propaganda of the emperor Charles V with a new classical imagery

“O libro parti per Roma e se ti chiederanno da dove vieni, risponderai che vieni dalla regione della Via Emilia” (Marziale: Epigrammi, III, 4)

Già in epoca romana la via Emilia era considerata il fulcro di un’area territoriale. Asse di congiungimento tra il Mediterraneo dominato da Venezia e l’Europa continentale, la via Emilia viene definita una mesopoli (Farinelli 2019) cioè una regione con città di medie e piccole dimensioni (14, più due decentrate), a poca distanza tra loro, di forte identità storica e culturale, che nella prima età moderna hanno fatto parte di tre stati diversi: le legazioni pontificie, il ducato Estense e il ducato Farnese. Questa la prospettiva geografica e culturale da cui prende le mosse l’idea del convegno. A fronte di numerosi studi sull’importanza della Via Emilia come arteria socio-economica, meno si sono approfonditi i rapporti intellettuali tra le città emiliane nella prima età moderna. Il convegno intende contribuire a colmare tale lacuna concentrandosi sulle accademie fiorite nella regione della Via Emilia.
Dopo le grandi censure sette e ottocentesche sul fenomeno culturale delle accademie, gli studi si sono spesso concentrati su accademie famose (Intronati, Lincei, Accademia della Fama, Incogniti di Venezia, Oziosi di Napoli, ecc.), su individui famosi che di accademie hanno fatto parte (Marino, Galilei, Tasso, ecc.), su pubblicazioni particolarmente significative scaturite da ambienti accademici, oppure su città sedi di accademie importanti (Siena, Venezia, Firenze, Roma, ecc.).
Il recente sviluppo a livello internazionale degli studi sulle accademie italiane ha seguito due direzioni, spesso intrecciate, che insieme danno conto della vastità del fenomeno accademico e delle sue implicazioni. Sulla scia dell’opera di Michele Maylender, poi approfindita da Amedeo Quondam, vi è l’evoluzione in formato digitale del censimento delle accademie, dei loro membri e delle loro pubblicazioni (si vedano le banche dati relazionali Italian Academies 1525–1700, realizzata presso la British Library, e Accademie siciliane nel regno asburgico 1400–1701, di Delphine Montoliu – Università di Tolosa). Inoltre, vi è l’aggiornamento della ricerca su accademie, e relazioni tra accademie, meno frequentate dagli studiosi (Gurreri et al. 2015, Testa 2015, Everson et al. 2016, Chiummo et al. 2017, Alfonzetti et al. 2017, Sampson 2019). Le realtà periferiche, insieme all’attenzione per le relazioni tra accademie nella fervente attività culturale della prima età moderna, sono adesso al centro dell’attenzione degli studiosi (Battistini 2008).
Diversamente dalle regioni sottomesse a un dominio centrale (Toscana, domini veneziani, Regno di Napoli), le città sulla via Emilia e quelle immediatamente adiacenti (Ferrara e Ravenna), non godono di una coerenza storico-istituzionale altrettanto unitaria, ma godono di una notevole coesione se analizzate in una prospettiva geografica che ha come suo fulcro proprio la Via Emilia, l’asse viario che da secoli connette praticamente tutte le città della regione adesso conosciuta come Emilia Romagna. Per questo motivo è necessario analizzare nel loro insieme le realtà accademiche di questa speciale area, e rendersi conto delle loro diversità, affinità, scambi e produzioni siano esse pubblicazioni a stampa o manoscritte, spettacoli teatrali, eventi musicali o produzioni artistiche. Scopo primario del convegno è dunque una serie di interventi che mettano in luce le realtà accademiche sorte lungo la via Emilia e i suoi dintorni, i loro intrecci e sviluppi, e la presenza delle accademie ebraiche in alcune città dove la presenza di questa minoranza religiosa era sentita. Altri due aspetti che si intende integrare, riguardano 1) lo sviluppo di strumenti di informatica umanistica (grafo) per lo studio delle accademie e dei loro intrecci, in collaborazione con l’Università di Pisa; 2) la dimostrazione della permanenza del termine accademia e della sua flessibilità, attraverso la presentazione di un progetto di ricerca sulla Parker Academy a Clermontville (Ohio) a metà Ottocento.