Abstracts for Vol. 27 (1996) of SCJ
These are alphabetized by author; these letters are linked to the first author with each initial.
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Anne Wheathill's A Handfull of Holesome (though Homelie) Hearbs (1584): The First English Gentlewoman's Prayer Book
Colin B. Atkinson and Jo B. Atkinson
University of Windsor
Although nothing is known of Anne Wheathill, her prayer book was published by a major printer of devotional books, and its contents suggest she was a Calvinist-leaning member of the Church of England. As a woman she was expected to be silent and subordinate, and, lacking aristocratic status, she had only her preface and the arrangement of her prayers by which to establish authority. In her preface she argues that her zeal and chastity compensate for her lack of learning and that her words are as acceptable to God as those of the learned, her tone moving from "feminine" deference and humility to Christian leadership. The preface closes with a prayer for all humanity, and the prayers that follow address universal concerns, not those of women specifically. Finally, she appropriates a numerological pattern, the hexaemeral week of weeks, usually associated only with the most subtle and learned male writers, as the underlying structure of her book.
Plague Imagery as Metaphor for Heresy in Rubens' The Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier
Christine M. Boeckl
University of Nebraska at Kearney
In 1617 Peter Paul Rubens painted the allegorical altarpiece, The Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier. Most of the represented events have been previously identified. However, the prominent foreground figure, a reclining man on the brink of death, seems to have been misinterpreted "as a person raised from the dead." I propose instead that Rubens depicted an infidel cured by the missionary of bubonic plague, the illness being a manifestation of the man's former heretical views. This reading is supported by another Antwerp painting dated in the same year, the Allegory of the Jesuit Order, that contains an explanatory Latin text denouncing the "Plagues of Heresy." The article will address the previously ignored sixteenth-century literary topic that linked plague to heresy; it will also clarify the dichotomy in seventeenth-century allegorical and narrative plague scenes.Monstrous Metamorphosis: Nature, Morality, and the Rhetoric of Monstrosity in Tudor England
Kathryn M. Brammall
Dalhousie University
Until the middle of the sixteenth century, established English wisdom identified monsters in substantially the same way it had throughout the previous millennium; thereafter a deviation from the traditional pattern materialized. A relaxation of definition created, by 1570, a type of English monster virtually unknown before 1550, one that lacked any external sign of its inward monstrosity. English authors, anxiously attempting to come to terms with and find a cure for the widespread political, religious, and social tensions of the mid-Tudor period, realized that, with some creative manipulation, the language of monstrosity would prove a powerful rhetorical tool. By focusing increasingly on deviant behavior rather than physical appearance, mid-Tudor authors (perhaps most notably John Knox and John Ponet) gradually transformed the meanings of familiar symbols, creating in the process a rhetoric of great polemical potency and utility.
Vasari on Competition
James Clifton
Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston, Texas
In Giorgio Vasari's monumental Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects of 1550 and 1568, we find the first sustained use of artistic rivalry for rhetorical purposes, supporting Vasari's notion of the progress of the visual arts. Vasari embraces healthy competition--and rejects its opposite, envy--as a means not only of developing the individual's skill but also of improving art itself in a communal endeavor. Competition-envy is a recurring leitmotif in the Lives; particular attention is given here to references in the lives of Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. Vasari is ultimately unable to reconcile the conflict between the dynamic of artistic progress and the stasis of the artistic perfection he found in Michelangelo, and recommends that artists follow the example of Raphael in eschewing direct competition with Michelangelo.
The Establishment of Protestantism in a Provincial Town: A Study of Shrewsbury in the Sixteenth Century
Barbara Coulton
Lancaster, U.K.
In early-sixteenth-century England, Protestantism took hold to varying degrees according to region. Shropshire, on the borders of Wales, was religiously conservative. The town of Shrewsbury had a minority of Protestants, but with the support of leading gentry, the new religion was fostered from early in Elizabeth's reign. Two developments contributed to the successful establishment of Protestantism in the town: the presence of a school that flourished under a learned, "godly" preacher from Cambridge, and the preaching ministries at the two largest churches, over which the borough council gradually gained control. Factions developed within the community--"puritan" and "anti-puritan"--and their controversies are recorded. The Cambridge connection with the town and the school continued to be important. Surviving documents include letters and minutes of council meetings, which afford an insight into the process of Protestantization in Shrewsbury.
Hájek, Dubravius, and the Jews: A Contrast in Sixteenth-Century Czech Historiography
Zdenek V. David
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Two disparate viewpoints on Jewish issues emerged in sixteenth-century Czech historiography, represented respectively by a parish priest, beholden to local interests, and provincial in his outlook, and by a prince of the Church, consorting with royalty and intellectually at the peak of a cosmopolitan Renaissance culture. Hájek's Czech Chronicle gathered the charges that would lead to the expulsion of the Jews from Bohemia in 1541. His work mirrored the plebeian anti-Jewish hostility in Bohemia in the decade preceding the banishment. Dubravius wrote Historiae regni Boiemiae (1552) in Moravia, an area marked by a greater religious tolerance than Bohemia, and the Bohemian objectives were not particularly relevant for his intended West European readership. Moreover, against the raw and crude prejudices communicated by Hájek, Dubravius's approach was likely to reflect the more enlightened norms, adopted by papal and royal courts. These differences contradict the allegedly close dependence of Dubravius on Hájek's work.Was Arminius a Molinist?
Eef Dekker
Utrecht University
The Protestant theologian Jacobus Arminius (1559-1609) was acquainted with the much debated theory of middle knowledge, invented by his Roman Catholic contemporary Luis de Molina (1535-1600), and he incorporated it into his own Protestant theology. First, a sketch of the theory of middle knowledge is provided. The body of the article consists of a comparison of parts of Arminius' disputation on divine nature with some central clauses from Molina's work. Arminius warmly welcomed the theory of middle knowledge, for it provided a method for reconciling God's foreknowledge, grace, and predestination with human free will. In this sense, then, Arminius can be called a Molinist.
The Italian Reformation and Juan de Valdés
Massimo Firpo
Translated by John Tedeschi)
University of Turin
The essay offers an interpretation of the Italian Reformation that attempts to encompass the manifold autonomous and creative traits which prevent it from being considered as a mere failed extension of the Protestant Reformation. To properly evaluate the Italian movement's distinctive doctrinal and social characteristics, its penetration to the highest reaches of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, its success in the cities of the peninsula, as well as the underlying intellectual premises exported abroad by its radicals, the "eretici," it is essential to consider the decisive role in these developments played by the theology of Juan de Valdés, who found refuge in Italy in 1531, after he had been condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. Italian Valdesianism, the heir of a complex religious tradition in which Erasmianism, alumbradismo, and Lutheranism come together in a subtle doctrinal synthesis, constitutes, also through the northern emigration of certain of its adherents, a fundamental element for understanding the religious crisis of the sixteenth century."The reik of Maister Patrik Hammyltoun": John Foxe, John Winram, and the Martyrs of the Scottish Reformation
Thomas S. Freeman
Rutgers University
John Foxe's celebrated and influential Acts and Monuments is, among other things, an indispensable source for the martyrdoms of Scottish Protestants on the eve of the Scottish Reformation. Yet although Foxe's book contains unique eyewitness accounts and documents concerning the Scottish martyrs, Foxe himself never visited Scotland, much less conducted research there. This article seeks to establish when and how he acquired the materials on which he based his accounts of these martyrs, and argues that almost all of them were sent to him in 1564 by a single informant. This informant was John Winram, one of the leaders of the Reformed Kirk, who was, before the Reformation, a participant in the heresy trials of several of the Scottish martyrs. Winram's motives in supplying Foxe with information which incriminated himself are discussed, as are the implications of this for our understanding of the Scottish Reformation. Also discussed is the significance of this for understanding the different types of sources Foxe employed in the Acts and Monuments and how he obtained them. This in turn, leads to a greater understanding of the accuracy of Foxe's work, which remains a fundamental source for the history of the Reformation in the British Isles.
"Doctors of the Military Discipline": Technical Expertise and the Paradigm of the Spanish Soldier in the Early Modern Period
Fernando González de León
Springfield College
Spain had one of the most successful armies of the early modern era; nevertheless, the "Military Revolution" thesis proposed by Michael Roberts and others depicts this army as a backward institution attached to antiquated techniques and ideas, and its commanding officers as inflexible and unrealistic Don Quixotes. A careful reading of the major works of military science produced by Spanish officers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries reveals that far from being "foils to progress," these soldiers formulated standards based on experience, merit, and technical knowledge and these standards had a significant impact in the professional debates of their day and in the incipient scientific revolution in the Iberian world.
A Dominican Head in Layman's Garb? A Correction to the Scientific Iconography of Giordano Bruno
Edward A. Gosselin
California State University, Long Beach
The scientific iconography of Giordano Bruno shows him with a Dominican cowl but not tonsured. This article argues that Bruno is likely to have continued to use a tonsure from the time he left his monastery in Naples in 1576 at least to the time he arrived in Geneva in 1579. There is reason to believe that he may have continued to wear a tonsure even after that time. His use of the tonsure indicates his continued religious attachment. This argument portrays Bruno as a Catholic dissenter, quite the contrary to what his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific portraiture would lead one to believe.
Life-Writing and the Theme of Cultural Decline in Valeriano's De Litteratorum Infelicitate
Kenneth Gouwens
University of South Carolina
Although often described as an account of the destruction of Italian humanism by the Sack of Rome, Valeriano's dialogue, De litteratorum infelicitate, actually affirms continuity, both by redefining the republic of letters to have greater independence from Rome, and by forging a consistent identity over time for Valeriano himself. Mini-biographies spanning several decades deploy the sufferings of learned contemporaries as exempla of the perennial condition of scholars, victims of fortune. Despite its prosopographical form, Valeriano uses the dialogue to articulate a coherent narrative of his own career. Situating his move from Rome to Belluno in the context of the de-centering of Italian humanistic culture after 1527, he establishes continuities--both individual and collective--that later readers of his dialogue have, ironically, used it to deny.
Naldini's Allegory of Dreams in the Studiolo of Francesco de' Medici
Harvey Hamburgh
Montana State University
This article offers a new interpretation of Giovambattista Naldini's The Allegory of Dreams, commissioned for the studiolo of Francesco I de' Medici, in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Crucial to the symbolism of the painting must be the nodal object held by a female figure in the central foreground. The identification and interpretation of this glass object, based on ancient and contemporary sources on dreams, not only illuminates the allegorical meaning of the painting and its function in the studiolo, but also provides evidence of the personal involvement of a Medici patron whose pursuits in the arts and sciences are revelatory of the consciousness of an era.
Marriage, Clientage, Office Holding, and the Advancement of the Early Modern French Nobility: The Noailles Family of Limousin
Robert J. Kalas
Mount Saint Mary's College
The process of advancement within the épée nobility is examined in this article through a study of the history of one family during the sixteenth century. The rise of the Noailles from écuyers to ducs and pairs of France was largely the result of conscious planning by the leaders of the family in three areas: the arrangement of marriages, the creation of patron-client networks, and the acquisition of offices.
"It is dangerous (gentle reader)": Censorship, Holinshed's Chronicle, and the Politics of Control
Sarah A. Kelen
Allegheny College
Holinshed's Chronicles are introduced by a "Preface to the Reader: that worries: "It is dangerous (gentle reader) to range in so large a field as I haue here vndertaken, while so manie sundrie men in diuers things may be able to controll me" (A3r). It is significant that the Chronicles describe their own historiographic practice through the paired concepts of danger and control, for these two are thematic throughout the body of the history as well as the prefatory material. The textual control imposed upon the Chronicles by the Privy Council's excisions of certain sections of the 1586/7 edition is well known. I argue that such censorship is only one of the forms of control with which the Chronicles are concerned and that the control of texts, authors, and history constitutes a unified motif that structures the Chronicles.John Foxe and the Joy of Suffering
John R. Knott
University of Michigan
John Foxe rejected the early Christian and medieval emphasis on the exceptional nature of martyrs and on the disjunction between vulnerable body and transported soul, focusing instead on the human qualities of his Protestant martyrs and the communal experience of the persecuted faithful, which becomes the locus of the sacred. He avoided the miraculous in attempting to reconcile representations of horrific suffering with traditional affirmations of the inner peace and joy of the martyr. Much of the drama of the Acts and Monuments arises from intrusions of the ordinary (the gesture of wiping a sooty hand on a smock) and the unpredictable (a fire that will not burn). It is Foxe's deviations from the unwritten script of martyrdom and his occasional inability to contain the horror of a scene with assertions of spiritual triumph that give his narrative its power.
Adjudicating Memory: Law and Religious Difference in Early Seventeenth-Century France
Diane C. Margolf
Colorado State University
The Edict of Nantes (1598) attempted to restrict the legal memory of France's Wars of Religion and thereby regulate future relations between Huguenots and Catholics. Criminal lawsuits heard in the early seventeenth century by the Paris parlement's chambre de l'édit--a special tribunal established to adjudicate litigation involving Huguenots--illustrate this complex policy of oubliance, which provoked litigants and lawyers to debate the "remembrance" of wartime events before royal magistrates. As a result, the sixteenth-century past was sometimes legally revised but not forgotten; moreover, the chamber's activities promoted a collective political identity centered on the French monarchical state, even as they reflected the Huguenots' vulnerable position within that state.
Breaking the Silence: Women, Censorship, and the Reformation
Peter Matheson
Dunedin, New Zealand
The advent of printing was particularly welcome to women of the sixteenth century, who had been excluded from most arenas of public debate, for it provided access to packaged learning in the privacy of their own homes. By the same token, women were allergic to any censorship of books, especially of those in the vernacular, which closed down this option. Moreover, a small minority of women was enabled to contribute to the formation of public opinion through books and pamphlets. This is exemplified in the case of Argula von Grumbach, Protestantism's first woman author, who championed freedom of speech as integral to the Christian Gospel. In a series of eight publications in 1523 and 1524, with a circulation of some thirty thousand copies, she modeled the right and obligation of women to speak out on religious and social issues, using trenchant scriptural arguments to defend their right to do so.
When Maecenas Was Broke: Cardinal Pole's "Spiritual" Patronage
Thomas F. Mayer
Augustana College
Cardinal Pole's patronage makes an important test case as the study of patronage becomes an increasingly important part of the study of the Renaissance. Pole's patronage was "abnormal" in that it was conducted much more in terms of ideology than of material expectations and rewards. The explanation of the peculiar shape of Pole's patronage is twofold: (1) he was always short of cash, and (2) from very early on his clients regarded him as an icon, to whose burnishing they willingly contributed without making many further demands. Although a failure by the usual standards of patronage, Pole enjoyed much greater success both then and subsequently as an emblem/patron of a particular set of religious beliefs.
Polemic and History in French Brazil, 1555-1560
John McGrath
Boston University
The brief history of Ft. Coligny, a sixteenth-century French fortress built in Guanabara Bay, Brazil, is difficult to explain fully. Most of the few surviving sources that describe this colonial failure are of questionable reliability. This includes two written accounts published by Jean Crespin and Jean de Léry, which have usually been regarded as mutually supportive. This study reveals how and why these two works cannot be considered by historians as reliable evidence. Both the publication circumstances of each account and the illogical and impossible claims that each contains suggest that this version of events has been intentionally distorted by the religious, political, and personal biases of its authors. A more reasonable re-creation of this outpost's tragic history emerges only after one discounts the demonstrable exaggerations and falsifications of Crespin and Léry.
Controversy and "Correctness": English Chronicles and the Chroniclers, 1553-1568
Marcia Lee Metzger
Washington University
Rapid changes in politics and religion in England during the 1550s and 1560s posed special problems for the writers of English chronicles. The content of these popular histories had to be altered dramatically on an almost yearly basis to allow the authors to escape official displeasure, and even the research of history could prove a hazardous task. Yet the chroniclers, most of whom had Protestant sympathies, could use their works to express their own religious views, and even to have an impact on popular perceptions of the monarch. Ultimately, the chronicles proved a far more effective propaganda medium for Elizabeth and her Protestant supporters than for Mary and the English Catholics.
The Political Vision of Antoine Loisel
Jotham Parsons
The Johns Hopkins University
Antoine Loisel (1536-1617), a prominent Parisian lawyer, served as avocat du roi in a court which oversaw the Edicts of Toleration in Guyenne from 1582 to 1584. This court represented an attempt on the part of Henry III, Henry of Navarre, and the Parlement of Paris to reassert the power of the king and the law during a lull in the civil wars. In a series of orations given during his tenure, Loisel explored his and his colleagues' conceptions of royal authority and the authority of the judicial system. He began with an optimistic view that ascribed to his court a special role as interpreter and symbol of divine justice and harmony, which in itself could bring about social peace. As the court failed to achieve its political goals, though, he came to see law as an arbitrary system and force as the true source of social order, anticipating a Hobbesian outlook.
Nature and Supernature in the Dialogues of Girolamo Fracastoro
Spencer Pearce
University of Manchester, England
Fracastoro attempts in his dialogues to construct a philosophical anthropology in which mankind's supernatural vocation may be accommodated within the rational framework of a philosophy of nature frankly mechanistic in its tendencies. Just as human nature realizes the promise enshrined in the lower orders of creation, so the immortal soul is the fulfillment of potentialities latent in human nature itself. This fulfillment, while entirely consonant with the most general principles which govern the natural order of things, is gratuitous in the theological sense of dependent on God's grace. Though gratuitous, it is not adventitious; for it has its source in a human being, conceived of in accordance with Ficino's doctrine of the exemplar or first in its kind. This being is Christ, who in his person realizes the fullness of the human capacity for the divine life and makes it available to the rest of humankind.
Michelangelo's Lives: Sixteenth-Century Books by Vasari, Condivi, and Others
Lisa Pon
Harvard University
This study examines how a number of books published in the sixteenth century played important roles in formulating a public identity for Michelangelo as a singular artist touched by genius. The books discussed include Giorgio Vasari's first and second editions of his Vite de' più eccellenti architetti, pittori et scultori; Ascanio Condivi's biography Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti; the funerary pamphlet called Esequie del divin Michelagnolo Buonarroti; and a special offprint edition of Vasari's 1568 biography of Michelangelo. These books were neither the first biographies of Michelangelo, nor the earliest texts written about artists. Nonetheless, they were instrumental in building a public image of Michelangelo as an artist of outstanding stature; they did so through their dialogues with other texts and other genres, their amplified effects as printed and published books, and their tangible presence as objects which could be bought or given.
Gerrard Winstanley on Crime and Punishment
Michael Rogers
Northeastern State University
In the late 1640s and early 1650s, Gerrard Winstanley wrote much about crime and punishment, particularly in his final work, Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652). A great deal of the modern commentary on his legal thought has centered on whether or not the extensive criminal code in Law of Freedom constituted a totalitarian legal system in support of his utopian vision. A more fruitful approach is to view Winstanley's writings as part of a broad radical movement to reform the English criminal justice system. A close analysis of Winstanley's ideas reveals the uniqueness of his belief that law had to create the preconditions for the emergence of his communist utopia. At the same time, many of the specific laws and punishments he advocated within a democratized, decentralized legal system were also proposed by the Levellers, Quakers, and Fifth Monarchists in the 1640s and 1650s.
A Divine Apparition or Demonic Possession? Female Agency and Church Authority in Demonic Possession in Sixteenth-Century France
Moshe Sluhovsky
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The article discusses the possession and exorcism of sixteen-year-old Nicole Obry (1565-1566). It offers a three-layer interpretation of the case and argues that a combination of psychological, political, and gender issues brought about the woman's possession. I first suggest that possession by either good or evil spirits was a culturally recognized syndrome that allowed laypeople, mostly women, to express religious concern in a society that did not permit laywomen to address spiritual issues in more normative ways. Indeed, in her own perception prior to the clerical intervention, Nicole regarded herself as a visionary and not as a demoniac. The complexity of spirit possession as a psychological and psychopathological behavior also necessitates a personal (sub)conscious motivation, and I suggest that metaphors of penetration and possessions were directly related to Nicole's personal experiences and anxieties as a young woman. The social/cultural and the personal contexts are then connected to the religious tensions in early modern northern France. These events increased Nicole's personal anxieties and legitimated her initiative to address religious matters.
"For the Peace of Both, For the Humour of Neither": Bishop Joseph Hall Defends the Via Media in an Age of Extremes, 1601-1656
Dan Steere
Georgia State University
Bishop Joseph Hall was an articulate defender of the Elizabethan consensus, whose career began in the last years of Elizabeth's reign and extended well into the years of the Protectorate. As a widely read author and prelate, Hall's mixture of Calvinist theology and episcopalian ecclesiology placed him squarely between the Puritans and the proponents of a High Church. Throughout his career, Hall avoided extremism and consistently set forth the Elizabethan via media as the irenic solution to the growing factionalism within the church. While historians have generally focused upon the agents of change during this period, Hall is indicative of an influential group that labored unsuccessfully to maintain the Elizabethan consensus as the basis of church unity. His support of a broad church, in fact, may have been representative of the mainstream of informed opinion in England, even as late as the early years of the Civil War.
Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England
Wendy Wall
Northwestern University
Reading Gervase Markham's husbandry manuals, this essay argues for a "lowly" early modern conception of national identity that complemented the "high" georgic national myths promulgated by writers such as Edmund Spenser. In his numerous books on estate management, Markham argues that there is a natural national difference that renders English land and, therefore, its customs distinct from other countries. I argue that Markham's attempt to define a unique English agriculture is informed by three different phenomena: Markham's role as an author in a print marketplace in which he competed with foreign writers of agrarian guides, his use of print to model a new class readership united by nationality, and his insistence that "English thrift" informed his own process of compiling and organizing information. Markham's nationalizing of English husbandry shows us that particular formulations of national identity (that is, those based on land and territory) could be inflected by the material realities and the conceptual fictions of making books.
