Early Modern Era

Metropolis  and  Our  Uncanny  Reality
Both Crary and Burch discuss the varying degrees and progression of different cinematic techniques and their effects on entertainment itself and the viewer. The progression of monocular and one-dimensional film into a more uncanny and three-dimensional experience creates disorientation between the subject and the viewer as experienced in Lang’s 1927 version of the acclaimed film Metropolis .

Social and cultural historians and literary scholars have made substantial use of more generic and less time-sensitive broadside ballads, for example on crime or gender relations, while ballads on ‘affairs of state’ have been largely eschewed by scholars of popular political history, despite the growing availability of ballad literature, and their great potential as a teaching and research resource. This critical bibliography seeks to make these texts more accessible by providing a systematically and rigorously researched bibliography of all recorded and published broadside ballads on affairs of state between the outbreak of the Bishops Wars in 1639 to the Glorious Revolution in 1689. Arranged chronologically, the bibliography locates, dates and fully indexes more than 1050 titles - c. 3100 ballad sheets - drawn from around 10,000 extant sheets held in libraries in the UK and US. The entries provide reliable earliest possible publication dates (in many cases for the first time). Library and shelf mark locations for all publicly available editions and copies of each title, in UK and US libraries are given and contextualizing notes are provided throughout. There are indices for authors, publishers and subjects, including all names of people and places mentioned in the texts.

From amazon.com:
""Whoever needs an act of faith to elucidate an event that can be explained by reason is a fool, and unworthy of reasonable thought." This line, spoken by the notorious 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova, illustrates a deeply entrenched perception of religion, as prevalent today as it was hundreds of years ago. It is the sentiment behind the narrative that Catholic beliefs were incompatible with the Enlightenment ideals. Catholics, many claim, are superstitious and traditional, opposed to democracy and gender equality, and hostile to science. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Casanova himself was a Catholic. In The Catholic Enlightenment, Ulrich Lehner points to such figures as representatives of a long-overlooked thread of a reform-minded Catholicism, which engaged Enlightenment ideals with as much fervor and intellectual gravity as anyone. Their story opens new pathways for understanding how faith and modernity can interact in our own time.

Lehner begins two hundred years before the Enlightenment, when the Protestant Reformation destroyed the hegemony Catholicism had enjoyed for centuries. During this time the Catholic Church instituted several reforms, such as better education for pastors, more liberal ideas about the roles of women, and an emphasis on human freedom as a critical feature of theology. These actions formed the foundation of the Enlightenment's belief in individual freedom. While giants like Spinoza, Locke, and Voltaire became some of the most influential voices of the time, Catholic Enlighteners were right alongside them. They denounced fanaticism, superstition, and prejudice as irreconcilable with the Enlightenment agenda.

In 1789, the French Revolution dealt a devastating blow to their cause, disillusioning many Catholics against the idea of modernization. Popes accumulated ever more power and the Catholic Enlightenment was snuffed out. It was not until the Second Vatican Council in 1962 that questions of Catholicism's compatibility with modernity would be broached again.

Ulrich Lehner tells, for the first time, the forgotten story of these reform-minded Catholics. As Pope Francis pushes the boundaries of Catholicism even further, and Catholics once again grapple with these questions, this book will prove to be required reading."

""Swedish Pomerania 1720-1815: cultural encounters and identification" is Dr. Andreas Önnerfors doctoral thesis, defended in 2003 and treats a region of early modern Europe exposed to double cultural influences.
It addresses the following questions:
How did intellectuals in this province approach the geological fact of proximity to and the political fact of dependence upon the “North”, in this case study represented by Swedish rule. Did “German/Pomeranian” intellectuals adopt concepts of the North into their mind-sets? Was there a resistance towards such a process? If yes, how could this resistance and how could potential adaptation be explained? Research covered a period of roughly hundred years between 1720–1815 and argues that identification changed significantly over time, from rejection to inclusion via a phase of shared values. The discourse treated stretches from still almost scholastic disputes in the heavy style of early modern scholarship on the nature and quality of the North over a phase of cosmopolitan openness during the Enlightenment to a distinct re-definition of concepts of originality during early romanticism, the phase of national awakening in a variety of national imaginations ranging from Swedish Neo-gothicism to Estonian Estophilism. The conclusion of research was that the general outset of identification patterns remains stable and fixed over time, but that their content is exposed to dynamic processes of identification, promoted by fluid cultural and culture-transgressing encounters."

A reply to an earlier article of the same title by Mark Jenner. The argument is made that a close study of the materiality, content, production and marketing of seventeenth century broadside ballads indicate that they were produced for radically different markets, and cannot by default be judged as 'popular' or universally accessible print products.

This book examines John Calvin’s sense of vocation.

1) It begins with an analysis of thinking on prophecy in early, medieval, and Reformation theology.

2) It finds Calvin within a non-mystical, non-apocalyptic prophetic tradition that focused on scriptural interpretation.

3) It argues Calvin believed his prophetic authority was the same as Isaiah and Jeremiah, and suggests that he may have held himself to be infallible in matters related to Christian doctrine.

4) It argues that starting from about 1555, Calvin began to conceive the idea of encouraging one of the French 'lesser magistrates' (the princes of the blood royal) to rise up in armed conflict against the sitting French king with the aim of taking the throne.

5) Thus, it argues that when that did happen in 1562 when Louis of Condé gathered troops in Orléans and declared their intentions to liberate King Charles IX from the evil councillors surrounding him, this had Calvin's fingerprints on it -- Calvin was to a significant degree responsible for this turn of events.

6) Calvin pursued this plan, I argue, as one of a number of approaches to winning France for the gospel. In this way, the volume explores Calvin's sense of vocation and the impact this had on his political thought.

We propose to read Francis Bacon's doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacon's tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacon's epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacon's views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

Who cares about the start of an Aquarian age?Why should we have any interest in when it starts? Why not just avoid the question? Those are basic, sometimes subconscious questions that arise with the mention of this topic. This article is not intended  to answer the question, but you may find the answer here,  between the lines.In any period of great changes, especially when there are dramatic events,  the  turn of centuries, and a millennium change, mankind asks the legitimate question of  how to find orientation in the ages of the world. “I live here and now”, you may say and you are true. But how can youdefine now? Time is fleeing and so does now.Or as the saying goes: tomorrow is today already yesterday. And if you only have a now, you would no past and no future, no history and no expectation. In any linear or cyclical measurement of time, there must be orientation at some point, to begin a count, forwards or backwards: either a beginning, a world creation event, whether of the universe itself or by the founding of a great city or regime; or an end, like the end of a long calendrical period, or a destruction of the world. This is the true time frame of every historical narrative, which fixes its point on a mythic event, like navigators take a bearing on a distant mountain peak.Early Christian chronology used such mythical events like the creation ofthe world and adjusted the fictive beginning of the Anno Mundi count due to a biblical time frame 5500 years before the assumed appearance of Christ. Of both events or myths we have however no precise date.What time is it really? When in time are we? Are we at the beginning (how long is human memory?) or are we nearing the end? (How far into the future can you see?) It all depends on what you count, when you start counting and what tools you use for measuring. In principle, all this tools, whether the frequency of a Cesium atomic clock, or a pulsar, or a planetary movement, or a pendulum, or a crude chip in the rock to bear the sun and the moon at horizon, measure time in a dimension of space

A native of Bruges (now part of Belgium), Jacques de Coutre was a gem trader who spent nearly a decade in Southeast Asia in the early 17th century. In addition to a substantial autobiography written in Spanish and preserved in the National Library of Spain in Madrid, he wrote a series of memorials to the united crown of Spain and Portugal that contain recommendations designed to reverse the decline in the fortunes of the Iberian powers in Southeast Asia, particularly against the backdrop of early Dutch political and commercial penetration into the region. Translated into English for the first time, these materials provide a valuable first-hand account of the bigger issues confronting the early colonial powers in Southeast Asia, and deep insights into the societies De Coutre encountered in the territory that today makes up Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.

Print was disseminating fashionable ideas long before the advent of glossy fashion magazines. This paper explores how, in late seventeenth-century England, the cheapest printed products on the market could circulate information about fashionable dress and promote debates about its consumption. Top-knots were head adornments made with ribbons and lace. Worn by women, they provoked moral and social controversies which became the focus of satirical ballads and pamphlets of the period. These printed works were consumed by a broad cross-section of society across the country, making them an intriguing counterpoint to the more expensive visual sources that usually inform fashion historians. By locating the fashion for top-knots within the context of the production and trade of clothing textiles, this paper examines how high fashion could be encountered and appropriated by the ‘lower sorts’, and demonstrates that the eighteenth-century luxury debates, encapsulated in Mandeville’s ‘Fable of the Bees’, were already developing in the humble broadside ballad in the 1690s.

This article analyses the involvement of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de
Cisneros in certain of the cultural changes that took place while he was Archbishop of Toledo. It focuses above all on Alcalá de Henares and the University he founded there. Three aspects receive particular attention: 1) the administrative improvements brought about by the use of writing, including bureaucratic practices and the emergence of an archival culture; 2) the use of writing for ideological and propagandistic purposes, especially the burning of Islamic texts in Granada in 1500 and the diffusion of humanistic texts; and 3) policies to do with printing and publishing linked to the creation of the university College of St. Ildefonso and the creation of its library.

Images used to depict Mary II in broadside ballads were immensely varied. In 1689 there were twelve woodcuts of quite different women used to depict the new Queen. William appears on ten of these and again, each woodcut is different. Apart from their representational instability, however, the most striking aspect of these images is the way in which the modest and virtuous Mary was continually represented as openly baring her breasts. In an age when the way a woman was dressed, her ‘air’ and general bearing could give a clue to her character and standing, these images of Mary give distinctly ambiguous messages. Dressed in this way, Mary could, at the very least, be held guilty of ungodly ‘self confidence’ by proudly displaying her breasts, and of vanity by patching her face. In the later images she would have been vulnerable to the charge of excessive luxury by wearing a topknot – the cause of some considerable ballad debate over sartorial morality in the 1690’s. Representations of Mary and other monarchical figures that were used interchangeably on love, advice, pastoral and political ballads were the vehicles by which ballads could offer readers and hearers a fantasy. While the images displayed nobility and monarchy, the texts sang of people they could relate to and thus, through ballads, buyers could access the glamour, romance and seduction of the courtly world.

The Abhiraja/Dhajaraja story, the most important origin myth legitimizing Burmese kingship, is widely viewed as a central Burmese (Burman) tradition. Based on evidence from available pre-eighteenth century historical texts, many previously unexamined by scholars, this article finds that the Abhiraja/Dhajaraja origin myth developed in western Burma over three centuries before its appearance in central Burma in a 1781 court treatise. This analysis demonstrates that during a significant period of cultural borrowing, from the 1780s until the 1820s, central Burmese (Burman) literati inserted western Burmese (Arakanese) myths and historical traditions into an evolving central Burmese historical perspective with which most scholars are more familiar.

""This article revisits the “heroic and glamorous language” of recruitment and retention in seventeenth century England through an exploration of the market, medium and message of many hundreds of “military” ballads that were disseminated from London across the country, especially in times of war. These show that military volunteerism among the lower sorts was less surprising and more sophisticated than historians have previously imagined, which suggests the need to reconsider the 'professionalism' or trade identity of ordinary rank and file soldiers. It argues that the common use of the love song as a vehicle for military messages, reveals how regular soldiering became a new vocation for the “lower
sorts” in this transitional period for army development. This new “profession” not only marked a direct break from the older system of “estates” which put fighters at the top and
workers at the bottom of society, it was negotiating its place within the social structures of household formation in early modern England.""

Giovanni Fontana (1537-1611) was from the province of Modena: Vignola or Montetortore di Zocca (or even Gaggio Montano, Bologna). He was vicar of saint Carlo Borromeo in Nonantola, then in Milan, becoming his perfect disciple. From 1589 he was bishop of Ferrara, trying of coping there all that he learned al the school of saint Carlo.

This paper studies the interaction between clerical and lay English Catholics on the Continent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In contrast with Protestant exiles, who established separate exile churches, Catholic expatriates did not create churches specifically for the exiled laity. Catholics abroad did nonetheless get support from the religious convents, colleges, and monasteries, where they received some pastoral care, and liturgical nourishment. How this interaction gained particular features in the context of expatriate Catholics is discussed in three cases which are attributed great importance in Counter-Reformation Catholicism: sodalities, preaching, and saint veneration.

By presenting a Catholic case of confessional mobility, this essay contributes to scholarship on early modern exiles, which is dominated by work on Protestant migration. It also speaks to the study of the Catholic Reformation, by examining how this was shaped in a situation of mobility. In both cases, and more generally, it nuances the study of institutional and localised confessional lives. The evidence discussed in this article suggests that much of the exiles devotional and liturgical lives, and their sense of belonging, is to be found in informal networks and communal understanding, rather than in focused clear-cut institutions. This has bearing upon the records that have been created and passed on to this day, and their visibility in historical research.

This paper will mainly focus on the material culture surrounding the administration of the Lord’s Supper in the Reformed churches of the Dutch Republic. After a brief survey of the ecclesiastical setting for the service and the practical arrangements, it will principally concentrate on communion plate. Whereas the ecclesiastical decrees of the Catholic Church provided detailed stipulations about the appropriate form for liturgical vessels consecrated for the celebration of the mass, for the Reformed such matters were regarded as adiaphora. Nonetheless, communion plate was an important, if not essential, part of the administration of the Lord’s Supper. However, it, generally, tends to be considered only as part of broader studies of early modern silver and pewter ware rather than in its religious context. While Mark Petersen (2001) has drawn attention to the importance and spiritual significance of Puritan silver in New England, there has not been a similar consideration of communion plate in the Reformed Churches in Europe. In the Dutch Republic, silver and pewter beakers were used in a domestic environment as well as being commemorative items, but similar forms were adopted for the administration of the Lord’s Supper. The differences between secular and religious use will be considered, particularly in relation to their decoration and variations in design. Further research might reveal whether these vessels were regarded in a meditative and spiritual form similar to that identified in New England.

Perhaps one of the most prevalent topics discussed among musical theorists today is tonality—specifically, how it is perceived aurally and compositionally. For centuries, beginning as early as the Renaissance era and continuing on through the Classical era, composers have used the reliability, strength, and balance of tonal harmony to fashion cherished masterpieces of musical creativity, using what is called common-practice tonality. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century however, the foundations of this established tonal system began to crumble with the embracing of a new ideology—modernism, championed in music by figures such as Arnold Schoenberg. In spite of radically new ideologies, composers in the twentieth century sought to return to the principles and aesthetics of common-practice tonal harmony in what is known as neoclassicism. In this paper, I will discuss the evolution of tonality by discussing the expansion of common-practice tonal harmony in the Romantic era, the embracing of new approaches to music theory and composition in the Modern era, and the reacceptance of tonal principles in neoclassicism. By outlining these and other topics of discussion, I believe that one is able to shed light on the seemingly vague topic of tonality and broaden one’s understanding of the nature of tonality in general.

In May 1650, A Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings of Parliament and in Relation to the Armies in England and Ireland reported that ‘very lately [...] at Milton in Barkeshire’ a ‘company of [5] Royalists at an alehouse, being drunke, they out of zeale of affection to their King at Bredagh, would drink his health in blood, and to effect this, unanimously agreed to cut a peece of their Buttocks, and fry their flesh that was cut off on a grid-iron’. In this article, the cultural contexts in which this remarkable episode in Milton took place, and from which contemporary behaviours and their meanings were inevitably constructed, are explored: demonstrating how such events, rather than simply appealing to our taste for the bizarre and spectacular, can illuminate something of the everyday experience of royalists in interregnum England. Multiple imaginary readings of the report drawn from the very real discourses and milieu of 1650s England are examined, offering a broad range of perspectives from which contemporary readers of opposing political and religious stances might have received the piece. It will also be argued that these unusual drunken antics might be read as an attempt to enact a secular sacrament, expressing and strengthening a loving bond with the absent King, and as a means to heal and strengthen the blood of the dismembered ‘body politic: reflecting, more broadly, a politicisation of drinking, developing from the mid-seventeenth century that was to have far reaching consequences, perhaps even to our own day.

This article deals with text, image, publication and authorship of broadside ballads on affairs of state in the later 17th century. It focuses on a previously unknown ballad author, Richard Rigby, an Irish cobbler who lived in the London of the Restoration and Glorious Revolution.

At first glance, The Captive’s Tale, which covers chapters thirty-nine to forty-one, is a military adventure. The Captive orients us by recalling the opening line of _Don Quijote_ 1.1, except that instead of referring to an unknown place in La Mancha, he begins in León and alludes explicitly to his bloodline: “Somewhere in the mountains of León my lineage had its beginnings.”

Der Aufsatz skizziert ausgehend von der Titelmetaphorik eines barocken Erbauungsbüchleins das semantische Potential der Bildfelder "Wald" und "Jagd" als Sinnbilder für die Organisation kleinteiliger Textsammlungen und deren Rezeptionsmodi. Damit unternimmt er zugleich einen Beitrag zur Bestimmung der Gattung "Silva".

"On Hunting in Spiritual Forests. The title metaphors of Johannes Sinapius's 'Sylvula venatoria'."
Examining the title metaphors of a 17th-century book of edification, this article sketches the semantic potential of the image fields "forest" and "hunting" for organising strongly fragmented collections of early modern texts and their modes of reception. Thus it also aims to contribute to refinement of Wolfgang Adam's characterisation of the "silva" genre.

In this article, I will look at some of the Burman texts of Konbaung-era (1752- 1885) Burma and how their authors anachronistically posited in them Burman authority in pre-Burman conquest Arakan. That is, these texts contain stories legitimizing a superior-inferior cultural hierarchy and history of Burman rule into the history of Arakan, especially for the period corresponding to Ava’s height in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This ‘embedding’ of Burman authority, I will suggest, involved creating, in fact, a new history for Arakan of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. According to the “Burman” history of Arakan during these centuries, the Arakanese invited the Burmans to rule their land and a string of Burman-sponsored kings sat on the Arakanese throne. Arakanese chronicles which have survived, inscriptions, and architectural records, however, tell us a different story. These accounts suggest that the Burmans did not rule Arakan at all in the late fourteenth century, and when they did come to Arakan, the Burmans came as invaders who were repeatedly repulsed. Finally, I will suggest, it may have been Arakan that provided Upper Burma with the concepts and people who made the Ava kingdom, and thus the Ava period, what it was, rather than vice versa.

This paper presents three eighteenth-century documents from Crete which suggest that the Ottoman central administration attributed communal responsibility to the black people of Kandiye (mod. Herakleion). It argues that the case of Kandiye represented an Ottoman policy of treating the black people who lived in the Ottoman lands as belonging to an ethnic-racial community defined by skin color and that an examination of this policy can significantly advance our understanding of identity questions among African-Ottomans.

Rather than the continuance of Catholicism in post-Reformation England per se, I am interested in the relationship between Catholic literature and mainstream Protestant culture. This book focuses on Protestant editions and Protestant readers of Catholic texts and attempts to gauge their significance from the later sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth.