Abstracts for Articles in SCJ, vol. 28 (1997)
These are alphabetized by author; these letters are linked to the first author with each initial.
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Female Monasticism and Family Strategy: The Guises and Saint Pierre de Reims
Joanne Baker
Independent Scholar
This article argues for the existence of female social networks, which were centered around abbeys and which can be viewed as a female dimension to male patron-client networks. This female dimension forces some reevaluation of the nature of male patron-client away from the model of power structures towards a function of noble society. A study of the nuns who resided at the abbey of Saint Pierre de Reims, which was headed by a member of the Guise family, shows an expansive and interwoven network of women, both kinship and affinity, occupying the same physical space or communicating with each other. It also shows that a member of a social family who was assigned to a church career had a valuable and significant role to play in family strategies and dynastic planning.The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588-89), Anti-Martinism, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern England
Joseph Black
University of Toronto
The pseudonymous Marprelate tracts sparked one of the most famous pamphlet wars in sixteenth-century England. This article focuses on the anti-Martinist response, drawing on manuscript and printed sources to explore the wats in which church and state sought to counter Martin's Presbyterian message. At the heart of the controversy lay questions not only of ecclesiology but also of style, decorum, and audience. The tracts' noteriety stemmed largely from their use of polemical strategies aimed at attracting a popular audience, and the anti-Martinist capmaign reveals the anxiety with which Elizabethan officials viewed these efforts to foster public debate by means of the press. To some contemporaries, however, the polemic deployed to defend the church helped legitimize rather than suppress "Martinist" discursive freedom. The Marprelate controversy consequently provides a case study of a society still negotiating the social and political implications of print culture.Erasmus Becomes a Netherlander
István Bejczy
Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen
The current belief that Erasmus became a German during his first voyage to Basel in 1514 must be revised. During his voyage Erasmus neither transformed his Dutch into a German identity nor did he extend the notion of Germania from Lower Germany to the whole of Germany. On the contrary, he started to restrict the notion of Germania to Upper Germany and dissociated himself from this entity as a Netherlander (and sometimes as a Frenchman), although he never completely abandoned the "German" identity that he had adopted in his youth. The Netherlands Erasmus came to consider his homeland was first of all politically defined, but there are some instances in his work where he seems to consider his country separated from Germany by language as well; in fact, he must have been one of the first to acknowledge the existence of a distinct Netherlandic language.Deification as a Motif in Luther's Dictata super psalterium
Dennis Bielfeldt
South Dakota State University
Recently a group of Finnish scholars led by Tuomo Mannermaa has argued that since justification, for Luther, proceeds by Christ and the Christian forming a "real ontic unity" in which the believer actually participates in God, deification is a central theme in the Reformer's theology. The most sustained and detailed of this exciting new scholarship is Simo Peura's groundbreaking Mehr als ein Mensch?, a book that traces the deification theme in Luther between 1513 and 1519. After mentioning some of the significant Finnish research, this article focuses on Peura's attempt to find divinization in Luther's Dictata super Psalterium. While it agrees with Peura's contention that deification imagery occurs throughout the Dictata, it raises some critical methodological and ontological questions pertinent to the claim that, for Luther, believers really do acquire an ontic participation in God.
Machiavelli and the Rhetorica ad Herennium: Deliberative Rhetoric in The Prince
Virginia Cox
Christ's College, Cambridge
A portion of classical rhetorical theory of particular interest in a Machiavellian context is that which deals with the ethical ends (fines) of deliberative, or political, oratory. The theoretical account of this issue that presents the closest affinities with Machiavelli's rhetorical practice is that of the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, which gives equal weight to security and honor as the ends of political deliberation, supplies tactical guidance to orators seeking to argue the case of security over virtue, and identifies force and deception as the means by which security is achieved. The amoral character of this account of the ethics of political counsel tended to be obscured within medieval and humanistic traditions of commentary, whcih sought to bring the anonymous work into moral alignment with the rhetorical writings of Cicero and Quintilian. The force of tradiional moralizing interpretations of Ad Herennium may, however, be conjectured to have been weakened by the doubts over the text's Ciceronian authorship that gained ground during Machiavelli's lifetime.
The Trojan War of 1518: Melodrama, Politics, and the Rise of Humanism.
Craig W. D'Alton
University of Melbourne
Scholarly representations of the "rise of humanism" in Northern European universities during the sixteenth century have been under some strain since James Overfield's 1982 study, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany, which successfully critiqued earlier positivist narratives through a detailed examination of continental European experience. Students of sixteenth-century England have, by contrast, remained remarkably consistent in arguing that English humanists took over the universities of Oxford and Cambridge during the reign of Henry VIII, and while they did not eliminate the backward scholastics, they had considerable success in making them appear ridiculous. English historiography follows the rhetoric of its sources: humanism is presented as the dawn of the New Age--an intellectual, scholarly achievement. This paper challenges such orthodox representation by examining reactions to the founding of three humanist lectureships at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1518.
Patterns of Godly Life: The Ideal Parish Minister in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Thought
Neal Enssle
University of Chicago
When George Herbert wrote The Countrey Parson, he did so intending to "set down the form and character of a true pastor, that I might have a mark to aim at." The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was a time of transition for the English Church, and Herbert was not alone in his attempt to redefine and to justify the role of the parish minister. Many ministers published sermons describing an idealized image of the ministry, idolizing those among them who seemed to personify the ideal. Though there has been a great deal of recent work examining the everyday life of the English minister, virtually nothing has been done on the ideals of these men. Examining the writings of men like George Herbert, Edward Dering, and Richard Greenham and biographies by John Foxe and Samuel Clarke may help to illuminate the motives that shaped the conduct of the Puritan minister.
A Question of Right: Hermann Conring's New Discourse on the Roman-German Emporer
Constantin Fasolt
University of Chicago
In his New Discourse on the Roman-German Emporer Hermann Conring (1606-1681) argued that the Roman Empire had disappeared from the face of the earth or had at least been reduced to a sorry remnant in the hands of the papacy. Germany was a modern state that existed on entirely independant foundations. Conring's analysis helped to restore a lasting political order without invoking principles of universal governance that the Reformation had effectively destroyed. In spite of its brevity and disputed authorship, the New Discourse can thus serve as an introduction to one of the main turns on the road from medieval to modern conceptions of political order. Its success raises two questions: Is the history that Conring deployed to make his case still worth telling? And how are we to explain its success in the first place? The answers to those questions go beyond the limits of this article.Confessionalization and Popular Preaching: Sermons against Synergism in Reformation Saxony
Patrick T. Ferry
Concordia University Wisconsin
Confessionalization is a major concept for study of the German Reformation. The urgent objectives of confessionalization caused reformers to utilize various media, but the most obvious way to reach a mainly oral culture was through preaching. The impact of preaching upon individual hearers was often negligible, but sermons, for all their limitations, were still the best available device for forging corporate confessional identity and for creating doctrinal uniformity. This study investigates how arguments disputed within the synergistic controversy were passed from leading Gnesio-Lutheran preachers through postils and other published sermons to parish pastors for their own sermon preparation. The cure of souls and orthodaox teaching were the dual driving forces for sermon writers. Parishioners were regularly informed about the intricate details of doctrinal orthodoxy, but sermons indicate that preserving theological principles was never an end in itself. Hearers' spiritual interests also seemed very much at stake.For the Good of the City: The Bishop and the Ruling Elite in Tridentine Modena
Michelle M. Fontaine
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Italian Wars, economic disaster, social strife, and religious controversy upset any semblance of unity, peace, or order in Modena, a little city in north-central Italy. Just as chaos and crisis reached a peak, Edigio Foscarari arrived as Modena's first resident bishop in over fifty years. He immediately began to forge an alliance with the ruling elite. Together, the bishop and the elite addressed pressing issues involving Christian morality and social ethics by leading urban religious ritual, mediating social conflicts, and caring for poverty-stricken citizens. This essay on the crisis in Modena and the alliance between the bishop and the ruling elite in the public sphere casts new light on the nature of episcopal activity, the intersection of religion and politics, and the development of Catholic reform in Tridentine Italy.
Homines non nascuntur, sed figuntur: Benvenuto Cellini's Vita and Self-Presentation of the Renaissance Artist
Victoria C. Gardner
University of Pennsylvania
Benvenuto Cellini's Vita has been interpreted as the isolated self-portrait of a fiercely independent and somewhat unstable Renaissance artist since its publication in the eighteenth century. Cellini's deceptively conversational and casual narrative voice has contributed to this impression. The Vita is, however, far from artless. Cellini's style masks his carefully calculated self-presentation, which was based on the authoritative precedent of Giorgio Vasari's contemporary Lives of the Artists. Following Vasari's evolutionary model of artistic development, Cellini crafted his autobiography to position himself as the ultimate artist in this tradition. This article examines the Vita both as Cellini's quest for personal immortality and as an agent in the changing role of the artist in Renaissance society.The Collegium Mauritianum in Hesse-Kassel and the making of Calvinist Diplomacy
Holger Thomas Gräf
Hessisches Landesamt für geschichtliche Landeskunde, Marburg
Although much research has been undertaken in the field of confessionalization, still little is known about the connections between the religious and ecclesiastical dismemberment and the emergence of of an early modern power system and, especially, of a professional diplomatic corps. The main obstacle in the study of this link is the lack of biographical information about many of the "diplomats." However, by examining the professors and studentsof the Collegium Mauritianum in Hesse-Kassel during the reign of Landgrave Maurice (1592-1627), it can be demonstrated how the prince managed to create and to educate an elite both willing and able to serve his state beyond its territorial borders. Because many refugees taught and studied as students at the Collegium, this institution was open to the influence of international Calvinism and made a crucial impact on the course of the landgrave's foreign policies in the developing power system of early modern Europe."I My Self": Queen Elizabeth I's Oration at Tilbury Camp
Janet M. Green
Kent State University-Ashtabula
Queen Elizabeth I made one of her most famous speeches on August 9, 1588, at Tilbury Camp. Its authenticity has been doubted occasionally, but substantial evidence indicates that it is genuine. Its internal rhetorical characteristics link this oration strongly to Elizabeth's others. Also, considerable contemporary evidence exists that she delivered a speech at Tilbury whose phrases, often remarked, were like those of the speech we have. Finally, one of the two surviving texts--BM Harleian MS 6798, article 18--is in the handwriting of another, namely of Dr. Leonel Sharpe, author of a 1623 letter first published in the Cabala of 1654, in which Sharpe (almost certainly an eyewitness at Tilbury) gives the now familiar text. Though the Harleian MS is in a few places literarily inferior to the Cabala text, it is nevertheless an important link to that text and shows with much more certainty that both are genuine.
The New World and the Changing Face of Europe
Elliott Horowitz
Bar-Ilan University, Israel
In making sense of the New World and its inhabitants, many European observers attributed considerable significance to the question of the beard. This essay shall argue that the discourse concerning the beard and its meanings that emerged as a result of the New World encounter may be discerned not only in European writing but also on European faces, especially during the sixteenth century. Before 1492 the most prominent aliens in the European mind were the Muslim and the Jew, both of whom were widely imagined and graphically represented as being bearded. After 1492, however, this situation changes markedly. The Jew and the Turk were still alien, but the mental symbol of radical otherhood, as Tzvetan Todorov has observed, became the American Indian. After the encounter between the Old World and the New and as each gradually penetrated the mental world of the other, the inhabitants of neither could apprehend the presence or absence of facial hair in precisely the same way they had done so before. The whiteness of the faces of the conquistadors and the heaviness of their beards became part of a single image of European identity on both sides of the Atlantic in which beardedness was closely associated with whiteness and, hence, with European culture in its widest sense. It is with this semiotic shift and its reflection in the changing face of Europe that this paper shall concern itself.
Paradox and the Praise of Women: From Ortensio Lando and Charles Estienne to Marie de Romieu
Anne R. Larsen
Hope College
Marie de Romieu's "Brief Discours, Que l'excellence de la femme surpasse celle de l'homme" (1581) has long been considered a conventional polemic that sides with the profeminists in the querelle des femmes. Romieu's recent editor also points out that her discours is a close imitation of Charles Estienne's adaptation of one of Ortensio Lando's paradossi that reveals nothing new. This study argues that, to the contrary, Romieu's discours is a bold refashioning of her sources that differs considerably, in ethos and in style. Such a reading of Romieu's text alongside her sources brings out significant gender and political differences.
Maniera, Music, and Vasari
Katherine A. McIver
University of Alabama at Birmingham
It has long been understood that Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists (1550; rev. ed. 1568), manipulated various biographical facts and ideas in his text for a singular purpose. Paul Barolsky and others have written extensively on Vasari's various motifs and recurring themes. This study examines one theme, that of music, which has been neglected. Throughout Vasari's text the author manipulates the role of an artist's music ability and the use of musical terminology to validate the nobility of painting and to define bella maniera. Music making, for instance, can lead to an artist's downfall: Lappoli abandons painting to make music, often with his friend Parmigianino. At others times Vasari uses music as an illustration of moral virtue, as in the case of Garofalo, who was a good and virtuous man who could also make music. Similarly, Vasari can merely describe a painting in which angels play lutes or he might adapt the language of music to discuss painted color and its harmonious effects.In the Light of Orthodoxy: The "Method and Disposition" of Calvin's Institutio from the Perspective of Calvin's Late-Sixteenth-Century Editors
Richard A. Muller
Calvin Theological Seminary
Calvin's Institutes was passed on by the nineteenth-century editors of the Corpus Reformatorumas a document without any descriptive apparatus or chapter summaries and subheads, leaving the task of writing an apparatus to modern translators and editors like Otto Weber and J. T. McNeill. This bare text was not, however, the Institutes known to its late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers. The present essay describes the development of an apparatus for the Institutes between 1559 and 1585 and offers an assessment of the perception of the Institutes, its structure, and organization, that was offered by the old apparatus in the century after Calvin's death.
To the Attentive, Nonpartisan Reader: The Appeal to History and National Identity in the Religious Disputes of the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands
Charles H. Parker
Saint Louis University
In the aftermath of the Arminian-Calvinist dispute in Holland, two leaders in the controversy wrote massive histories of the Dutch Reformation. Johannes Uytenbogaert, an Arminian minister in Utrecht and The Hague, published his Kerckelijcke Historie in 1646. Jacob Trigland, a Calvinist minister in Amsterdam, responded in 1650 with his Kerckelijcke Geschiedenissen. Despite significant theological differences, these dueling histories shared three fundamental similarities. They established historical continuity between their doctrinal views and a Reformation heritage; they imputed a distinctly Dutch character to their religious parties; and they engaged a "nonpartisan" reader in a dialogue between history and myth. Since these histories use the same rhetorical strategy to make a persuasive case to a Dutch audience, they reflect an emerging national identity in the mid-seventeenth century.Calvin and the Libri Carolini
James R. Payton. Jr.
Redeemer College
Beginning with the 1550 edition of his Institutio Christianae Religionis, Calvin included a section that criticizes the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicea II, 787). For his treatment he relied on the 1549 edition of the Libri Carolini--a work written by the theologians of Charlemagne's court as a response to the Nicene Council. Little known through the Middle Ages, the Libri Carolini caused a considerable stir upon their 1549 publication. A surprising recent discovery is that Calvin had already made use of the Carolingian document in 1547, in his response to the Council of Trent. This study examines what is known about the provenance of the Libri Carolini, the number and location of the copies known to have existed by the sixteenth century, how the Libri Carolini came to be published, and Calvin's use of them, and it offers an explanation of how he could have access to them before they were published.Bragueta Humanística; or Humanism's Codpiece
Jeffery C. Persels
University of South Carolina
Drawing on a classical repertoire of rhetorical figures as well as on the contemporary exaggeration of virility in dress, exemplary French evangelical humanist François Rabelais attempts to legitimize his and his peers' pedagogical program to improve morals by identifying it with a positive, triumphant image of the masculine. In the first of the chronicles of the Utopian dynasty, the 1532 Pantagruel, the eponymous giant's disciple, Panurge, uses his "magnificent codpiece" at a key juncture in his master's career to overcome the scholastic challenge to the fledgling humanist reform. In the context of this rhetorical strategy, the "Pantagruelists" ultimately carry the day because they are more "virile" than the entrenched opposition they are destined to supplant and who are pointedly characterized as aged, weak, and effeminate.
"To Promote a Woman to Beare Rule": Talking of Queens in Mid-Tudor England
Judith M. Richards
La Trobe University
The onslaughts against Mary Tudor's rule by such Protestant clerics as John Knox and Christopher Goodman, made on grounds of her sex, did not sit well with the more usual English views on female power in the mid-sixteenth century. Inherited traditions and contemporary retellings of the history of such a mighty if mythical queen as Semiramis were much more ambivalent than that and easily invoked by both detractors and defenders of women's rule to shore up their respective arguments. In brief, there was no simply dominant preferred position on that question in England. There was, unsurprisingly, a preference for male-exercised authority, but the contemporary social realities ensured that a clear-cut exclusion of women from the exercise of all authority over all men was not a practical proposition.
The Rape of Dinah: Luther's Interpretation of a Biblical Narrative
Joy A. Schroeder
University of Notre Dame
In their moral and allegorical interpretations of the story of the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34), many patristic and medieval interpretersreveal their assumptions about the victim's complicity in sexual attacks. These interpreters suggest that victims prvoke rape and succumb to their own lust as they are violated. Martin Luther interprets the story from the perspective of Dinah's father, the patriarch Jacob. While he shares with other exegetes the belief in the perils that await women who leave the protective confines of their homes, Luther differs from the medieval interpreters in his insistence that Dinah was an innocent victim of unprovoked violence. Attending to the literal meaning of the text, Luther focuses on the interior anguish of Jacob, who mourned the injury done to his young daughter.In the Flower of Their Youth: "Portraits" of Venetian Beauties ca. 1500
Brian D. Steele
Texas Tech University
The gazing beauties examined here require reflective scrutiny to discern a moral subtly offered by beauty itself. First, commentary on Petrarch's verse and statements by Pietro Aretino, Ludovico Dolce, and Girolamo Fracastoro establish historical expectations of painting and attitudes toward interpretation. The audience that results is interested in stylistic "meaning," appreciative of pleasure but expectant of moral content, cognizant of ambiguity, and attuned to nuances of interpretation. Then, employing an extended analogy between reading and viewing, paintings are discussed in accordance with a moralizing response to floral, textual, and corporeal exemplars of idealized beauty's fragile bloom. Contemplative viewers may have been tempted to react "as if" the image lives, but in the final analysis, they were guided by visual disjunctions to reconsider beauty, its negation, and the enduring image. Ut pictura poesis, sensuous beauty veiled moral or explanatory aims.
The Good Shepherd: François LePicart (1504-56) and Preaching Reform from Within
Larissa Juliet Taylor
Colby College
Feared and ridiculed by Calvinists, François LePicart was considered the "soul of the people of Paris," a man many felt was responsible for keeping Paris in the Catholic fold. An examination of 270 sermons by the most popular preacher in Paris offers a window onto religious mentalitites in the decades before 1562. Instead of the eschatological anguish and prophetic imminence suggested by Denis Crouzet, LePicart's sermons express hope, and present God as the loving father. Concerned with heresy and the trouble of the times, LePicart set forth a a reform program that anticipated the ideas of Trent and the early Jesuits. Far from being a prophet of doom, LePicart had every hope that once reform was accomplished the problems would cease. Only after his death in 1556 did military, religious, and political factors converge to lead to the breakdown of order.
Religion, Discipline, and the Economy in Calvin's Geneva
Mark Valeri
Union Theological Seminary in Virginia
Based on Genevan Consistory records from 1542 to 1564, this article argues that Calvin's teaching on the body social informed ecclesiastical restrictions on usury and other commercial innovations. The tendency of Genevan entrepreneurs to adopt new market strategies in order to profit from French refugees and other newcomers turned Calvin against the most salient instruments of the market. He feared especially for the fate of truth--the reliability of language as a means of social communication--in the midst of entrepreneurial ventures and schemes to commodify credit. Against temptations to individualism, Calvin promoted public admonition and excommunication as forms of corporate discipline. Throughout, he insisted that Genevans identify themselves as members of the body social. This combination of religious discipline and moral theory, grounded in the notion of communication and directed against the market, should cause us to rethink the Weberian formulation of the ethos of Calvinism and its relation to capitalism.
Le Sainct Espirit…parlast par sa bouche: Marguerite de Navarre's Evangelical Revision of the Chastelaine de Vergi
Nancy Virtue
Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
In the seventieth novella of the Heptameron, Marguerite de Navarre retells the very popular medieval tale, La Chastelaine de Vergi. This article examines novella seventy in light of the changes Marguerite made on its analogue and reads the story primarily as a product of Marguerite's Evangelical spirituality. Oisille, the story's narrator, and the most religious of the frame narrative storytellers, recasts the story as an exegetical lesson in the new testament. She transforms a tragic tale of the failure of courtly love into an inspirational act of evangilism intended to renew her listener's faith in Christ. This study adds to scholarship which argues that prereformist spirituality is central to Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron.Primacy of Individual Conscience or Primacy of the State? The Clash between Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert and Justus Lipsius
Gerrit Voogt
Kennesaw State University
The bitter clash between Justus Lipsius and Dirk Volckertsz. Coornhert, occasioned by Lipsius' Politica, reveals the different agendas of these two men. Lipsius' almost axiomatic acceptance in the Politica of only one official religion in a state was abhorrent to Coornhert, a staunch champion of freedom of conscience. Coornhert proffered spiritualist objections to Lipsius' primarily political (and religiously neutral) views. Lipsius intended the Politica as a political manual for rulers and thus as a natural sequal to his earlier De Constantia, a Neostoic guide out of the morass of religio-political strife and vicissitudes so prevalent at the time. But Coornhert saw in Lipsius' arguments for uniformity the grave danger of a return to persecution and religious intolerance. He rejected the primacy of Staatsraison and argued instead for a pluriform state whose inhabitants would be allowed to follow the light of their own conscience in making a religious choice.
Michelangelo's Risen Christ
William E. Wallace
Washington University, Saint Louis
The Risen Christ by Michelangelo in the shucrh of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome is one of the artist's least admired works. While modern observers frequently have found fault with the statue, it satisfied its patrons enormously and was widely admired by contemporaries. Not least, the sculpture has suffered from the manner in which it is presently displayed and from biased photographic reproduction that emphasizes unfavorable and inaproporiate views of Christ. In this paper, I examine the Risen Christ afresh by restoring it to its original context and discussing its original and moving iconography. Thus, it is possible to comprehend the effect of the Christ as a devotional object, to appreciate its success as a work of art, and to account for some of the modern distaste.
