Abstracts for Articles in SCJ, vol. 30 (1999)
These are alphabetized by author; these letters are linked to the first author with each initial.
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Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Spiritual Diaries: Self-Examination, Covenanting, and Account Keeping
Effie Botonaki
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
The rise of autobiographical writing in the early modern period and its proliferation in the seventeenth century has been related to various sociopolitical, cultural, and theological factors. Drawing upon women's spiritual diaries, this paper explores the links between diary writing and the Protestant duty of self-examination as prescribed by a large number of devotional manuals. The adoption of the dictates and male discourse of these guidebooks by the women diarists, however, was frequently rather problematic and led to unresolvable contradictions. By following the dictates of the manuals, the passive and meek woman, which the dominant seventeenth-century ideology was striving to mould, was transformed into an authoritative confessor as well as a shrewd account keeper and negotiator.
"The Truth of the Divine Words": Luther's Sermons on the Eucharist, 1521-28, and the Structure of Eucharistic Meaning
Thomas J. Davis
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
This article examines Luther's preaching on the Eucharist from 1521 to 1528. It finds therein a hierarchy of eucharistic meaning that corresponds to Luther's broader theology in both structure and content. Though much has been made of Luther's fight on a second front in the eucharistic controversies (the issue of presence and its mode), this article argues that, based on these sermons, one sees that presence never supplants the Word as the primary thing of the Eucharist. Though some have argued that Luther's emphasis on presence either distorts his earlier teaching, is a renegade Catholic element, or results in presence supplanting the Word in the structure of his eucharistic teaching, this article reads Luther's sermons in such a way as to see presence as an inherent part of the Word itself, thus clarifying some of the issues involved in the eucharistic controversies. It becomes clear that, for Luther, the real issue is not presence as such but the nature of God and God's revelation.
The Seymour Sisters: Elegizing Female Attachment
Patricia Demers
University of Alberta
History has forgotten the Seymour sisters. Although they were important as potential marriage partners, used by their father to broker alliances, they also created a stir among the members of La Pleiade with their publication of 104 Latin distichs paying tribute to the recently deceased Marguerite de Navarre. The sophisticated word plays and allusions of their Hecatodistichon (1550) show a close familiarity with the writing of the Protestant-sympathizing French queen and a perceptive awareness of the coupling of spiritual and secular ambitions. This essay offers the first English translation of their work after situating it in a reconstructed context.
Texts, Lies, and Microfilm: Reading and Misreading Foxe's "Book of Martyrs"
Thomas Freeman
University of Sheffield
Despite the universally acknowledged importance of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (popularly known as the "Book of Martyrs"), the actual text of any of the original editions of it remains largely unknown even to scholars. This is because many scholars continue to rely not on the original editions but on the more accessible unabridged Victorian editions of Foxe's book. Yet these nineteenth-century editions seriously distort Foxe's texts by concealing the differences between the various editions and through bowdlerizations, omissions, and even extensive rewriting of them. This article examines the extent and nature of the textual corruptions in the Victorian editions of the Acts and Monuments as well as describing their effects on subsequent scholarship. Finally, this article also argues that serious scholarship on Foxe's book must be based on the original editions of it, or the microfilms of these editions, and not on the distorted Victorian editions.
Idle Works in Rabelais' Quart Livre: The Case of the Gastrolatres
Virginia Krause
Brown University
When Pantagruel and his band arrive on Gaster's isle in the Quart Livre a strange spectacle awaits them. The Gastrolatres are idle and yet the dedicated servants of Gaster; decadent and yet subject to poverty; idolatrous and yet like Pantagruel, an evangelical prince, who partly shares their fate: "honoring" and "serving" the idol Gaster. This study argues that Rabelais uses the allegorical climb up Virtue enacted by Pantagruel and his friends at the onset of the episode, pilgrimage imagery, and public works discourse in order to challenge Catholic orthodoxy's doctrine of works as a means of justification. The Gastrolatres episode offers a lesson on work with distinctly Calvinist resonances at odds with the defense of cooperation in the storm at sea episode in the 1552 edition.
The Origins of Peter Riedemann's Account of Our Faith
Werner O. Packull
Conrad Grebel College
Peter Riedemann's Account of Our Faith has been designated the most substantial, coherent statement of faith and practice of the early Anabaptist-Hutterite community. This article examines the historical context of the Account's origin. An analysis of Riedemann's correspondence suggests that the two-part division of the Account and its repetitiveness was the result of two separate writing periods. Thus the second part, the so-called "Six Tracts," is best understood as Riedemann's response to issues disputed with the clergy while he and his two companions were imprisoned in Marburg, Hesse. The first part of the Account, on the other hand, was most likely written under the more pleasant circumstances in Philip of Hesse's hunting lodge at Wolkersdorf. There are no persuasive reasons to reject Hutterite claims that the entire Account was written in Hesse--issues that were current in Hesse are reflected in the document. The evidence, therefore, suggests that Riedemann intended the Account as a personal and community apology addressed to Philip.
The Origins of Rural Calvinism in Aunis: The Sphere of Influence of La Rochelle
Pascal Rambeaud
University of La Rochelle
This article explores the origins of Protestantism in Aunis and suggests the reasons for its spread between 1520 and 1568. It examines the Reformed community through the vehicle of its religious and social structures. The Protestant baptismal, marriage, and church admission registers of La Rochelle and local notarial records are the primary sources. They reveal the demographic and social dynamics during the period prior to the Protestant coup d'etat of 1568 at La Rochelle: between 1559 (the date of the earliest baptismal act) and 9 January 1568. An estimate of the Protestant population of La Rochelle indicates that Protestants had been a majority at La Rochelle since the 1550s. But it is impossible to have an equally firm notion for Aunis. The sources do disclose that Calvinism spread from La Rochelle to the rest of the province even though the Rochelais and non-Rochelais were two distinct populations: one urban, the other rural. The diffusion can be traced through patterns of godparentage as well as through the activities of political figures, merchants, and artisans from La Rochelle. As members of the elite, they wanted proper education for their children who, in the process, came into contact with the Reformation. These people were members of the corps de ville and even lords of local seigneuries in the hinterland beyond La Rochelle. As such, they served as agents for the spread of Calvinism to the outlying region. Altogether, the Reformed churches of Aunis were situated near the city of La Rochelle, along the coast, and in the western part of the province where the population was concentrated.
Rembrandt's Reformation of a Catholic Subject: The Penitent and the Repentant Saint Jerome
Catherine B. Scallen
Case Western Reserve University
Rembrandt etched the subject of Saint Jerome in prayer three times in his early career. In each of these etchings, he transformed elements of the traditional iconography of the penitent Jerome, who physically chastises himself for his sins, to emphasize the repentant nature of Jerome's prayer, or the inward, spiritual meditation upon his failings. Through such transformations of a long-standing iconographic tradition, Rembrandt created images of a saint that would be acceptable to many Protestants as well as Catholics. Two explanations can be offered to account for these changes. Rembrandt's conception of Saint Jerome was consonant with his general interest in older figures, internally engaged, an interest that was marked in his earliest works. At the same time, Rembrandt would also have recognized that his revised imagery of Saint Jerome, presented in the print format, could achieve wider distribution in Europe than the more confessionally limited type on which he based his works.
The Swabian League and Peasant Disobedience before the German Peasants' War of 1525
Thomas F. Sea
University of Western Ontario
The response of the Swabian League to the early stages of the Peasants' War of 1525 can only be properly interpreted in the context of the League's previous experiences with peasant disobedience. Policies and procedures developed in these earlier, highly controversial and divisive, encounters used force, or the threat of force, but also emphasized the need to reach mediated settlements that returned the peasants to lasting obedience, often by granting some of their demands. This study examines some cases of the League's previous handling of peasant disobedience and shows how and why these methods developed. There was no reason to expect that such procedures would not work once again when the Swabian League was confronted with peasant unrest in late 1524 and early 1525. Thus the Swabian League's negotiations with the rebellious peasants during this period should not be dismissed as merely delaying tactics. In fact, the League's policies anticipated the methods of dispute settlement developed after the Peasants' War to prevent further rebellion.
Combining Martha and Mary: Gender and Work in Seventeenth-Century English Cloisters
Claire Walker
The University of Newcastle, New South Wales
In the post-Reformation Church, strict monastic enclosure compounded the traditional religious and social ideologies limiting nuns' opportunities to support themselves. The English cloisters, established in France and the Low Countries, were further frustrated by their isolation from England which provided novices, alms, and much of their regular income. To survive the nuns transformed their everyday tasks into revenue-raising activities. A combination of prayer, needlework, hospitality, education, and housework generated sufficient income for most convents to withstand the economic and political hardships of the seventeenth century. These strategies can best be understood as a reworking of the centuries-old Martha/Mary metaphor, in which Martha stood for the active apostolate and Mary represented the contemplative life. Monastic archives show that the nuns reinterpreted the metaphor in such a way that they could not only gain commercial benefit from religious duties, but they could also inject different meanings into prayer and domestic chores.
Friends and Relics at San Silvestro in Capite, Rome
William E. Wallace
Washington University
This article relates the history of a little known Michelangelo project for a reliquary tabernacle in the church of San Silvestro in Capite, Rome. A primary object of the essay is to explain the social dynamics contained in this history and to reveal the interplay of personal, political, and professional relations that are involved even in a minor undertaking by a major artist. Particularly important is the cast of characters involved and the blurring of the boundaries of patronage, favor, and friendship. Ultimately the project is interesting for the view it provides of Michelangelo in a dense web of social relations at an unusually busy moment in the artist's career.
The Language of Citizenship in the French Religious Wars
Charlotte C. Wells
University of Northern Iowa
This article traces the evolution of ideas about citizenship in the ideological conflicts of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century France. It documents the uses of the word citoyen itself in political literature intended to appeal to a wide audience, emphasizing the pamphlet literature of the religious wars. Results of the study show that the various parties involved in the civil strife employed citoyen in ways that reflected their beliefs about what membership in the French state really meant. Nonetheless, an evolution in the meaning of the word can be discerned: from being simply a synonym for "bourgeois," citoyen came to also indicate membership in the national--as opposed to local--community. Finally, the article suggests how the employment and understanding of citoyen reflected the growth of absolutist ideology in the early seventeenth century.
"Neither Married nor Cloistered": Blessed Isabelle in Catholic Reformation France
Thomas Worcester
College of the Holy Cross
Nicolas Caussin (1583-1651) was a French Jesuit, an eloquent preacher, and a prolific writer; in 1644 he published a life of Isabelle, the sister of Saint Louis. This article examines Caussin's accolade of Isabelle's steadfast refusal to marry, and of her decision to lead a life of Christian piety in the world, not in the cloister. The early modern French state sought to subject the marital choices of even adult children to parental control, and the post-Tridentine Church sought to restrict women to the choice of a husband or a cloistered convent. Pere Caussin directly challenged both ecclesiastical and civil authorities as he lauded female freedom of conscience in vocational choices. His seventeenth-century panegyric of a thirteenth-century devout princess offers an intriguing window onto the intersection of religion, politics, and perception of gender in Catholic Reformation France.
The World's Worst Worm: Conscience and Conformity during the English Reformation
Jonathan Wright
Hartlepool, England
This article explores the ways in which conscience was anatomized during the early modern period and how the central role afforded to it in moral decision making meant that conscience was constantly invoked in the polemical war between the faiths over the issue of religious conformity. This article identifies conscience as one weapon in the arsenal of an interventionist God determined to reprimand sinners, and then looks at the ways in which contemporaries described the operation of conscience. Refusal to conform, as well as insistence on conformity, is then explored. As a final indicator of the pivotal role of conscience, it is noted that even radical theological stances such as Nicodemism often framed their justifications in terms of conscience.
