Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies

This innovative collection explores the causes and effects of ‘disciplined dissent’ - forms of protest or political action positioned between the poles of submission and defiance. To identify the political influence of commoners the emphasis is neither ‘top down’ nor ‘bottom up’ but on mutual influence and the interplay between rulers and ruled. Contributions concerning quite diverse polities show a careful opposition of non-elite people through an effort to respect the legislative system and to find common ground with the authorities. The aim was to emphasize aspects of the norms and institutions in favour of the benefit of the community or to ensure adjustments of some aspects if found to be beneficial for the few and detrimental for many. The examination of non-violent pressure can help us to have a more exhaustive understanding of the protagonists causes and effects of socio-political changes in contexts of governmental development. The analysis includes cases of violent action that managed to secure royal approval. The premise of the book is that inequality far from being accepted as normal and inevitable was frequently questioned by less powerful people. When targeted by more or less evident forms of political marginalization they laid claim to principles of justice and on this basis developed a critical comprehension of government pursued a selective rejection of injustice and gained recognition through negotiation.

Pierre de la Ramée or Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) has long been a controversial figure in educational reform and innovation from the moment of his first public academic statements in the 1530s to his reception among scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is beyond dispute however is the vast reach of his influence throughout Europe. Ramus’s ideas were disseminated through copious editions and translations of his own textbooks and in wave after wave of adaptations and re-imaginings of his ideas that swept across the continent.

This volume embarks on a European tour of Ramism using a wide range of previously unpublished or untranslated archival evidence from throughout the continent to examine the dissemination of Ramus’s works and his intellectual influence in geographic and in disciplinary terms. The ten chapters explore the spread of Ramism from his home country of France to Protestant strongholds in Germany Holland and Britain and in the Catholic context of the Iberian peninsula. The book also examines Ramism in the less familiar territories (to most Anglophone readers) of Scandinavia and Hungary and considers the preceding and contemporary Dutch and German educational reform movements from which Ramus borrowed to forge his own distinctive intellectual method.

During the English Civil Wars and Revolution (1640-60) the affairs of Church and State came under a crucial new form of comment and critique in the form of public petitions. Petitioning was a readily available mode of communication for women and this study explores the ways in which petitioning in seventeenth-century England was adapted out of and differed from pre-Revolutionary modes whilst also highlighting gendered conventions and innovations of petitioning in that period.

Male petitioning in the seventeenth century did not have to negotiate the cultural assumptions about intellectual inferiority and legal incapacity that constrained women. Yet just because women did not claim separate (and modern) women’s rights does not mean that they were passive quiescent or had no political agency. On the contrary as this study shows women in the Revolution could use petitioning as a powerful way to address those in power precisely because it was done from an assumed position of weakness. The petition is not simply a text authored by a single pen but a series of social transactions performed in multiple social and political settings frequently involving people previously excluded from participation in political discussion or action. To the extent that women participated in collective petitioning or turned their individual addresses into printed artefacts for public scrutiny they also participated in the public sphere of political opinion and debate.

Although the Middle English texts broadly categorized as ‘devotional literature’ have received considerable scholarly attention in recent years much work remains to be done on the cultural meanings and textual transformations of vernacular religious writing during the later medieval period and into the sixteenth century. During these years popular (but still little-studied) late medieval works such as the Pore Caitif circulated in varied forms amid changing circumstances: the expansion of audiences for Middle English texts the emergence and persecution of Lollardy attempts at ecclesiastical censorship the advent of printing and the Henrician Reformation. How did Middle English religious texts answer changing cultural and practical needs and the requirements of orthodoxy? How did older texts find new readers; how did these readers alter and deploy them? This collection capitalizes on widespread current interest in these questions gathering original essays that analyse the many forms meanings and legacies of Middle English religious writing.

Employing a blend of historical philological literary and linguistic methods Richard Rowlands Verstegan: A Versatile Man in an Age of Turmoil paints a full-bodied portrait of Richard Rowlands Verstegan (or Verstegen 1550?-1640) - a man whose multiple and variously spelled name reflects a multifaceted public personality. English by birth and upbringing Dutch by fatherly descent Verstegan spent most of his life on the Continent employed intermittently as a Catholic spy poet religious translator polemicist and philologist. While this many-sidedness is typical of the Renaissance period some of Verstegan’s interests and positions were innovative or extravagant - witness his familiarization of the epigram in the Netherlands (1617) or his description of Teutonic England in the Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605). In this collection of essays Verstegan’s life and works are both explored in themselves and as mirrors of his times. As each contributor investigates one or more aspects of Verstegan’s careers a wider perspective is created of English and Dutch religious politics of the prevailing literary modes and fashions of the period and of the picture that Europe was beginning to paint for itself. Conversely this all-encompassing view demonstrates the centrality of a figure who has long been relegated to the margins of English Dutch and European history.

Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-92) was in his own time one of the most renowned of Renaissance figures. His myth has continued to fascinate both scholars and the many tourists who are drawn by it to explore what remains of the Medicean presence in Florence. Lorenzo’s first English biographer William Roscoe described him as the most remarkable man who had ever lived in ancient or modern times. This collection of essays explores Lorenzo’s apprenticeship as the de facto ruler of Florence and the means by which he exerted control over friends and clients to ensure the ascendancy of the Medici dynasty. The essays place the religious and artistic patronage of Lorenzo in the context of his political career and explore other important aspects of his emergence as the princely citizen of a still proud republic.

Francis W. Kent (1942-2010) established his reputation as a cultural and social historian of Renaissance Florence with his first monograph Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence. He turned his attention to Lorenzo de’ Medici in the late 1980s producing a steady stream of essays collected here for the first time and a major study of Lorenzo’s art patronage Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence. After the death of Nicolai Rubinstein in 2002 the first general editor of the multi-volume critical edition of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s letters Kent took charge of the ongoing project and oversaw the publication of several more volumes. His forthcoming biographical study of Lorenzo’s early career will be published by Harvard University Press.

From the English Civil War to the Fronde from Masaniello to Robespierre this book is one of the first attempts to create a European transnational approach to the problems of the early modern age. It proposes a detailed reconstruction of the main interpretative tendencies that have developed around the English Civil War the French Revolution the so-called ‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis’: the Fronde and the Neapolitan revolt of Masaniello. And yet Mirrors of Revolution agrees with neither the traditional social interpretations of the causes of revolt nor with revisionist approaches that privilege the influence of discursive registers. Instead it proposes an original interpretation of revolution based on the concept of political identity. In the terms of this analysis revolutions do not reveal previously hidden social groups. Rather revolutions become the central ground upon which new identities coalesce. With its usage of the Fronde and Masaniello as case-studies for extensive investigation Mirrors of Revolution outlines a challenging and exciting reformulation of the concept and causes of revolution.

This study is a threefold investigation of understandings of embodiment - as displayed in the playhouses courthouses and anatomy theatres of London between 1540 and 1696. These dates mark the waxing and waning of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons’ domination of the practice of dissection in London. In 1540 Henry VIII gave them his approval and encouragement but by 1696 Edward Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist: Or the Sham Doctor staged their loss of power. This loss of power the book contends is symptomatic of a major shift in the concept of embodiment. The book explains the changing understanding of the human body throughout this period by analysis of the interplay between the texts used in and the material practices of three specific public sites: the public playhouses the Sessions House and the Anatomy Theatre of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London. Using an approach which combines the socially textured understandings of fields of practice found in Bourdieu with the interpretations of progression across time found in Elias and Foucault The Theatre of the Body demonstrates how the three fields of drama law and medicine are intimately inter-connected in that process.

In presenting this analysis the author argues that the quality of embodiment begins to shift during this period from the mid-sixteenth century and throughout the course of the seventeenth century. In this shift one can observe how the earlier ‘traditional’ interpretation of embodiment is intensified and resolidified into the beginnings of the medicalized ‘modern’ body.

Performing the Middle Ages from ‘Beowulf’ to ‘Othello’ traces the dialogic nature of the relationship between the Middle Ages and modernity. Arguing that modern beliefs in the alterity of the Middle Ages stem from the Middle Ages’ own processes of self-representation Johnston explores varieties of nostalgia through a wide selection of texts. This volume spans an extensive chronological period with a view to demonstrating how our notions of the medieval have been crucially informed by the past itself. The study is focused on works which stage that popular literary archetype - the nostalgic figure of the aristocratic warrior - and argues that it is this image that provides a structural model for so many modern perspectives on the Middle Ages. And yet in the Middle Ages this model was being deconstructed as it was also being generated. By moving from the self-consciously archaic heroism of Beowulf to the scathing comment on chivalric narrative presented in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ Johnston’s analysis offers an intriguing insight into the way medieval texts engage in a continual aesthetic and ideological critique of their own cultural moment. Using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Arthure as examples of an incisive critique of the cult of subjectivity and of a highly self-conscious desire for tradition Johnston extends his analysis to the early seventeenth century and explores the ways in which Shakespeare’s Othello brilliantly deconstructs the very concept of ‘Renaissance Man’. With its interest in issues of subjectivity textual performance and the ideological self-awareness of medieval culture Performing the Middle Ages provides a scholarly and compelling investigation into the Middle Ages’ ability both to understand itself and to shape (post)modern notions of the medieval.

This volume examines the relationship between preaching and art addressing with particular detail the use of works of art in preaching and the importance of the pulpit itself. A challenging issue in the field of sermon studies is the relationship between preaching and art in particular the manner in which preachers used works of art in their preaching and described specific pictures in their sermons; and the pulpit itself.

The thesis of the book is that pulpits should be viewed in the context of the world of preaching in Renaissance Florence and in connection with sacred oratory. Indeed like preached sermons pulpits used rhetorical strategies to deliver religious messages. The author adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the topic by combining art history historical analysis and sermon studies; and she examines the pulpit's patronage location and function as well as its chronological development. This book combines a general survey of pulpits in Tuscany with close analysis of five specific pulpits. Designed and executed by important artists located in Florence and Prato these five pulpits are the most exquisite and impressive monuments of their type and each has a complex and rich iconographic programme. The author reveals that the period between the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries constitutes a distinct phase in the development of pulpits different from the earlier tradition and from pulpits constructed after the Council of Trent and during the Catholic Reformation.