BiblioVault - Books about 16th century

Jewish Life under Islam

Jerusalem in the Sixteenth Century

Amnon Cohen

Harvard University Press, 1984

Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century

Bernard Dov Cooperman

Harvard University Press, 1983

John Donne, Body and Soul

Ramie Targoff

University of Chicago Press, 2008

For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of Donne’s works into a complete image of the poet and priest. In John Donne, Body and Soul, Ramie Targoff offers a way to read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns.

Reappraising Donne’s oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, Targoff convincingly shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, Targoff reveals that Donne’s obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.

“Ramie Targoff achieves the rare feat of taking early modern theology seriously, and of explaining why it matters. Her book transforms how we think about Donne.”—Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge

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The Juan Pardo Expeditions

Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568

Charles Hudson. Afterword by David G. Moore, Robin A. Beck Jr., and Christopher B. Rodning

University of Alabama Press, 2005

An early Spanish explorer’s account of American Indians.

This volume mines the Pardo documents to reveal a wealth of information pertaining to Pardo’s routes, his encounters and interactions with native peoples, the social, hierarchical, and political structures of the Indians, and clues to the ethnic identities of Indians known previously only through archaeology. The new afterword reveals recent archaeological evidence of Pardo’s Fort San Juan--the earliest site of sustained interaction between Europeans and Indians--demonstrating the accuracy of Hudson’s route reconstructions.

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Judging the French Reformation

Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements

William Monter

Harvard University Press, 1999

This original look at the French Reformation pits immovable object--the French appellate courts or parlements--against irresistible force--the most dynamic forms of the Protestant Reformation. Without the slightest hesitation, the high courts of Renaissance France opposed these religious innovators. By 1540, the French monarchy had largely removed the prosecution of heresy from ecclesiastical courts and handed it to the parlements. Heresy trials and executions escalated dramatically. But within twenty years, the irresistible force had overcome the immovable object: the prosecution of Protestant heresy, by then unworkable, was abandoned by French appellate courts.

Until now no one has investigated systematically the judicial history of the French Reformation. William Monter has examined the myriad encounters between Protestants and judges in French parlements, extracting information from abundant but unindexed registers of official criminal decisions both in Paris and in provincial capitals, and identifying more than 425 prisoners condemned to death for heresy by French courts between 1523 and 1560. He notes the ways in which Protestants resisted the French judicial system even before the religious wars, and sets their story within the context of heresy prosecutions elsewhere in Reformation Europe, and within the long-term history of French criminal justice.

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Just Anger

Representing Women's Anger in Early Modern England

Gwynne Kennedy

Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

The first scholar to investigate the subject of women’s anger in early modern England, Gwynne Kennedy analyzes portrayals of and attitudes toward women’s anger in printed texts by or purporting to be written by women during the period.

Kennedy draws from recent critical work on emotions by historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and psychologists as well as comparative studies of the emotions by cultural anthropologists. Kennedy also examines a number of male-authored works, including sermons, conduct literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. The focus of her work, however, is on representations of women’s anger in printed works signed with women’s names in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. She addresses the ways these writings conform to, conflict with, or appear to reconfigure prevailing beliefs about women’s anger.

Kennedy looks at such literary texts as Mary Wroth’s romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, the first fiction by an English woman; Elizabeth Cary’s play, The Tragedy of Mariam, the earliest extant play in English by a woman; and Aemilia Lanyer’s verse collection, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. She also discusses religious writings by Protestant martyr Anne Askew and Elizabeth Cary’s history of Edward II. Kennedy considers as well defenses of women’s nature authored by women (Rachel Speght and Aemilia Lanyer) or published under female pseudonyms (“Jane Anger,” “Ester Sowernam,” and “Constantia Munda”).

Kennedy demonstrates the importance of class and race as factors affecting anger’s legitimacy and its forms of expression. She shows how early modern assumptions about women’s anger can help to create or exaggerate other differences among women. Her close scrutiny of anger against female inferiority emphasizes the crucial role of emotions in the construction of self-worth and identity.

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