Abstracts for Articles in SCJ, vol. 29 (1998)
These are alphabetized by author; these letters are linked to the first author with each initial.
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Juana "the Mad's" Signature: The Problem of Invoking Royal Authority, 1505-1507
Bethany Aram
Johns Hopkins University
A letter long attributed to Juana "the Mad" has inspired accounts of the queen's allegedly extreme passion for her husband, which supposedly rendered her unwilling, and even unable, to rule Castile. The present study challenges the status of this letter. More reliable documentary evidence of Juana's political activity not only belies the famous autograph, but also casts doubt upon standard interpretations of the queen's locura. As an instrument connecting individual and corporate bodies, the royal signature provides further insights into a queen's attemptsand ultimate failureto exercise royal authority.
The Church Fathers and the Canonicity of the Apocalypse in the Sixteenth Century: Erasmus, Frans Titelmans, and Theodore Beza
Irena Backus
Institut d'histoire de la Rformation, Universit de Genve
When Erasmus challenged the place of the Apocalypse in the New Testament canon in 1516 and in 1522, he was merely giving a fairly dispassionate appraisal of the patristic literature at his disposal: the ante-Nicene Fathers were chiliasts; Jerome had noted that the fourth/fifth-century Greek church did not accept the book. Eusebius and Dionysius of Alexandria questioned the Johannine authorship. Finally, Erasmus accepted the book because of the consensus ecclesiae and because of its historical value. In his reply to Erasmus (1530), Frans Titelmans insisted on the consensus ecclesiae, which he demonstrated went back to Dionysius the Areopagite and included the ante-Nicene Fathers and several later patristic and medieval commentators (excluding Joachim of Fiore and his disciples). Titelmans did not raise the question of chiliasm. Theodore Beza, who also tackled Erasmus (in 1557), chose to defend the book's canonicity on the strength of its generic similarity to Old Testament prophecies and because its status was guaranteed by the ante-Nicene Fathers. By privileging their testimony, Beza inadvertently admitted chiliasm. Erasmus' attack and the responses of both his adversaries show the fragility of the canonical status of the Apocalypse in the sixteenth century. The rediscovery of patristic literature meant in this case that the doubts of the early Greek church resurfaced in the totally Western context of the Reformation.
Heinrich Bullinger, the Covenant, and the Reformed Tradition in Retrospect
J. Wayne Baker
University of Akron
This paper is a response to the criticism of my interpretation of Heinrich Bullinger in Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition (1980) and (coauthored with Charles S. McCoy) Fountainhead of Federalism (1991). Criticism has focused on four aspects of my interpretation: (1) the centrality of the covenant in his thought, (2) whether his was a bilateral covenant, (3) whether he disagreed with Calvin on predestination, and (4) whether there were two Reformed traditions. After again carefully examining Bullinger's workseight early manuscript writings; thirty published works from 1526 to 1574; and relevant correspondenceI generally reiterate my earlier position on these four issues: (1) the covenant was the leading pervasive conviction in Bullinger's theology, (2) it was a bilateral, conditional covenant, (3) he taught a moderate, single predestination in contrast to Calvin's double predestination, and (4) Bullinger's (Zurich) theology was the basis for the original Reformed tradition to which Calvin and the Calvinists presented a later alternative in the matter of the covenant and predestination.
Reconstructing Lord Grey's Reputation: A New View of the View
Catherine G. Canino
Arizona State University
The View of the Present State of Ireland, a work traditionally attributed to the poet Edmund Spenser, purports to defend the reputation of Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, lord deputy of Ireland from 1580 to 1582. Because Spenser was Grey's secretary during his tenure in Ireland, generations of historians have accepted the View as an accurate characterization of the lord deputy and his handling of the battle of Smerwick on November 11, 1580. Specifically, the View contends that Grey's treatment of the Smerwick captives earned him censure throughout England and eventually precipitated his recall from Ireland in disgrace. However, read in the light of contemporary accounts and the state papers, the View's assessment of Grey seems to be inaccurate and incompatible with the experience and insight of Edmund Spenser. In fact, the View may be the source, rather than response, to rumors regarding Lord Grey.
The Social and Regional Origins of the Henrician Episcopacy
Andrew A. Chibi
Manchester Metropolitan University
Individual Henrician bishops are well known, but our knowledge of the bishops as an ecclesiastical elite is less cultivated. This article addresses the latter deficiency. It provides a new perspective on the Henricians and develops a comparative aspect in order to better contextualize them, and it shows them to be a social microcosm of early modern English society. This was done three ways: first, by undertaking a detailed analysis of their social and regional origins; second, by comparing the resulting data with the results of similar examinations of contemporary Italian, Scots, French, and Spanish bishops and with medieval English bishops; and third, the data were compared with statistics regarding the social, economic, and political nation as a whole. The article's findings demonstrate that the elite status achieved by Henricians was not attributable to their ascribed status, and that the Henrician bishops were ideally suited to the society they represented.
"I knowe not howe to preache": The Role of the Preacher in Taverner's Postils
Margaret Christian
Penn State Lehigh Valley
A sermon is analogous to a dramatic monologue in that it is "performed" by a preacher. In the case of postils, the editor creates that preacherly role for an actor other than the original author. Taverner's postils artfully construct their reader, giving him a role to play which diverges from the character assigned (in the preface) to the actual priests urged to perform the sermon from the pulpit. Where Taverner's postils adapt previously printed sermons, some of them widely noticed and controversial, by preachers as different in style and manner as Hugh Latimer and Cuthbert Tunstall, the postils' "I," consistently authoritative and congenial, differs markedly from the "I" of the original sermons. Because of Taverner's extensive modification of his source sermons, his collection offered a script which enabled every parish to include in its familiar worship routine an English sermon as ordinary orally delivered religious instruction largely consonant with Henry's political and the reformers' proselytizing aims.
Three Forms of Jeopardy: Honor, Pain, and Truth-Telling in a Sixteenth-Century Italian Courtroom
Thomas V. Cohen
York University
Three members of a small band of Spanish thieves appear before the court of the governor of Rome. One, in hopes of clemency, betrays his companions and lays out the story of his long criminal career, both with them and with others. He is thus a useful informant, not only to the judge but also to the historian. This essay recounts the experience of the men in the gang and then explores the political economy of their profession. It then turns to the matter of tactics in the court itself and discerns in the three prisoners three distinct styles of bargaining: supplication, the claim to honor, and energetic empiricism. All three are bids for fede, that is, for credit. Though at first glance very different, these three tactics have in common a willingness to point out the speakers' vulnerability. Thus all three rhetorical strategies reflect the paucity of both real and symbolic capital available to underlings in early modern Italy.
Italian Tridentine Diocesan Seminaries: A Historiographical Study
Kathleen M. Comerford
Benedictine College
After the 1563 Decree concerning Seminaries of the Council of Trent, each diocese was required to open a diocesan seminary. This article presents the foundation dates of Italian Tridentine diocesan seminaries and information concerning the procedure for opening such institutions. Since education was an integral part of the Catholic Reform, studying the educational institutions designed by that reform provides needed insight into the speed and effectiveness of the changes. Previous literature on seminaries falls into four categories: general, national, and local studies, and studies of seminaries run by religious orders. Much of this is commemorative, but late-twentieth-century diocesan and educational histories take a different and more practical approach to the institutions. The chart that follows the article demonstrates the relationship between councils and opening seminaries, identifies the most important seminary founders, and highlights areas of more intense educational reform.
The Painter Who Lost His Hat: Artisans and Justice in Early Modern Barcelona
Luis R. Corteguera
University of Kansas
A dispute between a Barcelona master painter and a royal judge provides the background for an examination of early modern popular notions of justice. For decades, historians have maintained that "popular justice" was essentially different from learned concepts of justice based on written sources and manifested in law and judicial systems. Yet Barcelona master artisans became familiar with law and formal legal procedures by judging over trade matters and by appealing to the royal Audincia, or high court. Artisans expected that laws and judicial tribunals should deliver justice in a fair and timely fashion, that justice should emanate from the monarch down through the system of justice, and that judges should conform with their offices' dignity. Popular and elite notions of justice derived from contesting uses and interpretations of these assumptions.
Maidens' Lights and Wives' Stores: Women's Parish Guilds in Late Medieval England
Katherine L. French SUNY-New Paltz
The dynamism of the late medieval English parish found some of its expression in new roles and opportunities for women. Churchwardens' accounts show a late fifteenth-century increase in the number and variety of parish activities carried out by women in all-women groups. Parish guilds for married women and single women became a part of communal religious practice, and a means of expressing religious concerns particular to women. Within these groups women organized, raised funds, socialized, and worshiped. These new roles gave women visibility and leadership opportunities, but also paradoxically affirmed and reinforced what were deemed to be appropriate female behavior and interests.
Stranger in a Foreign Land: Jos de Acosta's Scientific Realizations in Sixteenth-Century Peru
Thayne R. Ford
Brigham Young University
In 1590 Jos de Acosta's Historia Natural y Moral de Las Indias was published in Sevilla, Spain. This work typifies the conflict between sixteenth-century Jesuit cosmology and the existence of the American continent. As Acosta came to terms with this conflict, he made several important observations in the fields of biogeography and climatology. Historia Natural y Moral de Las Indias probably represents the first documentation of the phenomenon of altitude sickness. Acosta explains this sickness in naturalistic terms, marking the growth of secular explanations among sixteenth-century evangelistic organizations such as the Jesuits. Historia Natural y Moral de Las Indias is also significant because it shows a transfer away from the authority of the traditional scientific texts and toward the use of direct experience. Acosta, as an individual, possessed a strong interest in nature and things scientific, a quality considered by some to be non-existent in post-Reconquista Spain.
Paduan Aristotelianism and Daniele Barbaro's Commentary on Vitruvius' De Architectura
Branko Mitrovic
Unitec Institute of Technology
Daniele Barbaro's 1556 commentary on Vitruvius (second edition 1567) is generally regarded as the highest achievement of Renaissance Vitruvian exegesis. Because of Palladio's participation in its writing, architectural historians have devoted much attention to it in recent decades. However, the philosophical influences underlying Barbaro's arguments have been little studied so far, even though Barbaro himself was the author of a number of philosophical works. This study shows that Barbaro's views of a number of important issues in architectural theory, such as perception, optical corrections, imitation, meaning, and the formulation of the canon of the classical orders, were fundamentally determined by his Aristotelianism and Paduan philosophical education.
Calvin's "Argument du livre" (1541): An Erratum to the McNeill and Battles Institutes
Richard A. Muller
Calvin Theological Seminary
Quite a few modern studies of Calvin's Institutes have taken at face value the attribution by J. T. McNeill of one of the prefatory documents to Calvin's 1560 French translation. Ironically, of the various French editions produced during Calvin's lifetime, the 1560 edition is the only one that does not include this document. The present essay examines the document in its proper context and explains its significance in relation to the other materials prefatory to the various editions of the Institutes.
The Importance of Being Josiah: An Image of Calvinist Identity
Graeme Murdock
University of Birmingham
Calvinist reformers expected secular authorities to champion religious reform. Preachers presented kings and princes with ideals of godly rule drawn from the history of biblical Israelan aspect of the Hebraic patriotism that was pursued with much enthusiasm by early modern Calviniststo encourage magistrates to lead the implementation of reform programs. Many Calvinists found the life of King Josiah to be an excellent model for contemporary magistrates: Josiah as religious reformer, as iconoclast and destroyer of false religions, and as territorial expansionist. Calvinist writers also noted the prophecy of Josiah's violent death, which exemplified the fate believed to await those princes who failed to cooperate completely with projects of religious reform and social renewal. The importance to Calvinist rulers of "being Josiah" therefore reveals much about the political and cultural identity of Reformed Protestants across Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Humanism as Method: Roots of Conflict with the Scholastics
Charles G. Nauert
University of MissouriColumbia
Recent scholarship on Northern Humanism has asked whether humanist-scholastic conflicts represent a clash of rival cultures or only isolated quarrels. Overfield favored the latter view. Now Rummel challenges this conclusion, arguing that discourse degenerated from polite discussion to cultural war. Two major issues emergeddefense of orthodoxy, and professional competence to discuss certain questions. Research must focus on humanism as an intellectual method which challenged tradition not only in the liberal arts but also in theology, law, and medicine. Scholars must ask whether humanists (e.g., Lefvre and Erasmus) as professional rhetoricians undermined the scholastic quest for absolute truth. Second, they must ask how humanists as experts in grammar (including textual criticism) lodged a claim to control the ancient texts on which all traditional learning was founded. Both as an attack on dialectic and as a movement for textual criticism, humanism constituted a fundamental challenge to medieval intellectual tradition.
Ecclesiae militantis triumphi: Jesuit Iconography and the Counter-Reformation
Kirstin Noreen
Johns Hopkins University
The Ecclesiae militantis triumphi (1583, 1585), a print series reproducing the late-sixteenth-century ambulatory frescoes of Santo Stefano Rotondo, offered Jesuits a concise history of Early Christian persecution through the depiction of martyrdoms from the time of the primitive church. The addition of four allegories not found in the Santo Stefano Rotondo cycle develops the meaning of the print series and links Early Christian sacrifice with theological doctrine established at the Council of Trent. Guided by both text and image, Jesuits could meditate upon the historical litany of martyred saints and at the same time examine, through allegory, the Catholic position on issues such as grace, sin, and justification. For Jesuit missionaries to the Protestant north, the Ecclesiae militantis triumphi pictorially established contemporary Tridentine decisions as worthy of the faith and sacrifice demonstrated by the Early Christian martyrs.
Print and Pageantry in Baroque Rome
Laurie Nussdorfer
Wesleyan University
Printed descriptions of ceremonies, festivities, and pageants were a growth sector of publishing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Giving particular attention to the publishing format of such works, this article analyzes 110 examples produced in Rome between 1623 and 1655. The vast majority are quarto pamphlets of no more than sixteen pages. Political, devotional, and commercial motives were driving this type of publication, which participated in the general increase of cheap printed sub-book genres in the seventeenth century. In Baroque Rome ceremonial publications reflected the responsiveness of Catholic monarchs and religious orders to the new possibilities of cheap print as well as the growing commodification of news in these decades.
"Darke speech": Matthew Parker and the Reforming of History
Benedict Scott Robinson
Columbia University
This essay examines the nexus of religious controversy and English nationalism in the work of a group of historians and textual scholars employed by Archbishop Parker in the 1560s and 1570s. These scholars were engaged in editing and publishing documents of medieval ecclesiastical history; their work was dedicated to demonstrating the fidelity of Anglican practices to those of the ancient English church. Tracing the activities of Parker and his historians from their collecting of manuscripts to their handling of them in the preparation and editing of the printed editions, I argue that this polemical scholarship set out to reform the English past by reforming its texts, purging them of the "corruptions" of Catholic writers, readers, and scholars. In this way, Parker's textual and editorial practice endeavored to construct a purified past to testify to the truth of the English present.
The Christian Clergy in the Early Modern Holy Roman Empire: A Comparative Social Study
Luise Schorn-Schtte
University of Potsdam
This study attempts to compare Catholic and Protestant confessions with respect to the temporal function allocated to the clergy from outside its ranks. This basically secular question cannot be separated from the issue of the religious self-awareness of the priests and other clergy. This study proposes to approach the subject via the concept of social biography (Sozialbiographie), which attempts to combine the concept of ecclesiastical self-awareness with the temporal definition of clerical function. Social backgrounds, education, and training of the clergies is compared as well as their understandings of family and marriage and the ways in which these affected their concepts of the state and their place in it.
Gendered Virtue, Vernacular Theology, and the Nature of Authority in the Heptamron
Carol Thysell
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Marguerite de Navarre's Heptamron contains ample evidence that the author was interested, like the magisterial reformers of her day, in the problems of certainty and the nature of authority. Before and after each day's stories, the devisants debate whether or not French society's behavioral norms apply to men and women alike, but during their stay in the Cauteret mountains they create a nonhierarchical, nonauthoritarian community of equals. While their constant exchange of opinions has suggested to many interpreters that no single authorial or authoritative viewpoint may be determined, such conclusions ignore the guidelines for a process of discernment which emerge in the daily conversations. These guidelines are based on a shared theological anthropology similar to that of the reformers, but the process modeled has more in common with the vernacular theology practiced by Marguerite de Navarre's compatriots, the Beguines, some centuries earlier.
Books for Sale: Advertising and Patronage in Late Elizabethan England
Paul J. Voss
Georgia State University
The final decade of Elizabeth I's reign witnessed a sharp decrease in the number and generosity of literary patrons. This decline, however, did not cripple the rapidly growing book market. To offset the loss of potential income from wealthy benefactors, printers, publishers, and authors courted a new group of patronsthe growing number of individual readers in and around London. The printing press allowed advertisements, usually found on the title page or placed in the preliminary matter, direct access to potential customers, altering the increasingly archaic system of patronage. Printers and publishers employed many sophisticated forms of advertising, attempting to compensate for the decline in revenue while creating a new patronage system, a system where courting a large number of consumers became more important than pleasing an individual aristocrat.
A dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde, c. 1532: A Neglected Tract Belonging to the Last Period of John Rastell's Career
J. Christopher Warner
Kent State UniversityEast Liverpool
In the early 1530s, John Rastell, the barrister, printer, and kinsman to Sir Thomas More, converted from the orthodox beliefs of his family to become a religious and political reformer in the service of Thomas Cromwell. There survive a few, somewhat vague references to books written and printed by Rastell in support of the "king's causes," but until this time, students of the More circle have believed that these books had perished if they were really printed at all. This essay shows that in fact one such work did issue from Rastell's press and does exist, A dyaloge betwene Clemente and Bernarde. There are, furthermore, reasons to suggest that John Rastell was its author.
Civilizing the Savage and Making a King: The Royal Entry Festival of Henri II (Rouen, 1550)
Michael Wintroub
University of Michigan
This article analyzes the royal entry festival held for Henri II by the city of Rouen in 1550. It focuses on the entry's reproduction of a Brazilian village, which included fifty Brazilians. The conceptually indeterminate position of New World peoples in early modern France is used as a key to unlock the social and cultural narratives which organized the entry. Not simply displayed as curiosities, the Brazilians were scripted into the larger narrative of the king's entry. The well-known figure of Hercules (who also figured in the entry) plays a crucial role in understanding this narrative and the place that the Brazilians held within it. The identity of Hercules as an eloquent savage is used to analyze French perceptions of the Brazilians. The article aims to explicate the manner in which these cannibals came to mediate the interests and identities of those who wrote, organized, and watched the entry.
Breaking the Vessels: The Desacralization of Monarchy in Early Modern England
Robert Zaller
Drexel University
At his execution in 1649, Charles I remained in the eyes of many a divine king, this despite the fact that the concept of a sacerdotally marked or empowered monarch clashed with Reformation ideals. Indeed even the gathered might of John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and James Harrington could do little immediate damage to Charles' posthumous image as blessed martyr. Nevertheless, the Interregnum did sever the continuity upon which sacred monarchy rested. It was left, therefore, to the restored heir to reinvent monarchy, a task to which Charles II's lifestyle and personality were not suited; his licentiousnes and philandering attracted derision rather than adoration. As the intellectual presuppositions on which the sacred monarchy rested were eroded, the aura of the body royal faded.
