BiblioVault - Books about 17th century

“I have always loved the Holy Tongue”

Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship

Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg

Harvard University Press, 2011

“[An] extraordinary book.” —New Republic

Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek.

The mystery begins with Mark Pattison’s nineteenth-century biography of Casaubon. Here we encounter the Protestant Casaubon embroiled in intellectual quarrels with the Italian and Catholic orator Cesare Baronio. Setting out to understand the nature of this imbroglio, Grafton and Weinberg discover Casaubon’s knowledge of Hebrew. Close reading and sedulous inquiry were Casaubon’s tools in recapturing the lost learning of the ancients—and these are the tools that serve Grafton and Weinberg as they pore through pre-1600 books in Hebrew, and through Casaubon’s own manuscript notebooks. Their search takes them from Oxford to Cambridge, from Dublin to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they reveal how the scholar discovered the learning of the Hebrews—and at what cost.

[more]

Imperfect Creatures

Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740

Lucinda Cole

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Lucinda Cole’s Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of “vermin” as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Cole’s argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts—William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Abraham Cowley’s The Plagues of Egypt, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, the Earl of Rochester’s “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year—alongside other nonliterary primary sources and under-examined archival materials from the period, including treatises on animal trials, grain shortages, rabies, and comparative neuroanatomy.

As Cole illustrates, human health and demographic problems—notably those of feeding populations periodically stricken by hunger, disease, and famine—were tied to larger questions about food supplies, property laws, national identity, and the theological imperatives that underwrote humankind’s claim to dominion over the animal kingdom. In this context, Cole’s study indicates, so-called “vermin” occupied liminal spaces between subject and object, nature and animal, animal and the devil, the devil and disease—even reason and madness. This verminous discourse formed a foundational category used to carve out humankind’s relationship to an unpredictable, irrational natural world, but it evolved into a form for thinking about not merely animals but anything that threatened the health of the body politic—humans, animals, and even thoughts.

[more]

In His Milieu

Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias

Edited by Amy Golahny, Mia Mochizuki, and Lisa Vergara

Amsterdam University Press, 2007

Gathered in honor of John Michael Montias (1928–2005), the foremost scholar on Johannes Vermeer and a pioneer in the study of the socioeconomic dimensions of art, the essays in In His Milieu are an essential contribution to the study of the social functions of making, collecting, displaying, and donating art. The nearly forty essays here by—all internationally recognized experts in the fields of art history and the economics of art—are especially revealing about the Renaissance and Baroque eras and present new material on such artists as Rembrandt, Van Eyck, Rubens, and da Vinci.

[more]

In the Shadow of Salem

The Andover Witch Hunt of 1692

Richard Hite

Westholme Publishing, 2018

The First Complete Account of the Largest Supernatural Crisis in American history, and How Ordinary Citizens Brought It to a Close
By July 1692, the witch hunt surrounding the town of Salem and Salem Village had been raging for four months. The Massachusetts Bay colony’s new governor, William Phips, had established a special court to try the suspected witches and the trials were well under way. No new arrests had taken place for nearly six weeks and residents had every reason to believe the crisis soon would be over. However, a middle-aged woman in nearby Andover lay gravely ill. Her husband suspected witchcraft as the cause and invited some of the afflicted girls from Salem Village to the town, thinking they could determine whether his suspicions were valid. Not surprisingly, they confirmed his supposition. The first person these girls accused in Andover—a frail and elderly widow bereaved by a series of family tragedies over the previous three years—not only confessed, but stated that there were more than three hundred witches in the region, five times more than the number of suspects already in jail. This touched off a new wave of accusations, confessions, and formal charges. Before the witchcraft crisis ended, forty-five residents of Andover found themselves jailed on suspicion of witchcraft—more than the combined total of suspects from Salem Village and the town of Salem. Of these, three were hanged and one died while awaiting execution.
Based on extensive primary source research, In the Shadow of Salem: The Andover Witch Hunt of 1692, by historian and archivist Richard Hite, tells for the first time the fascinating story of this long overlooked phase of the largest witch hunt in American history. Untangling a net of rivalries and ties between families and neighbors, the author explains the actions of the accusers, the reactions of the accused, and their ultimate fates. In the process, he shows how the Andover arrests prompted a large segment of the town’s population to openly oppose the entire witch hunt and how their actions played a crucial role in finally bringing the 1692 witchcraft crisis to a close.

[more]

Increase And Multiply

Governing Cultural Reproduction In Early Modern England

David Glimp

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

A wide-ranging study of the ideology of population control in early modern England. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a growing notion of the value of a large populace created a sense of urgency about reproduction; accordingly, a wide array of English writers of the time voiced the need not merely to add more people but also to ensure that England had an abundance of the right kinds of people. This need, in turn, called for a variety of institutions to train-and thus make, through a kind of nonbiological procreation-pious, enterprising, and dutiful subjects. In Increase and Multiply, David Glimp examines previously unexplored links between this emergent demographic mentality and Renaissance literature. Glimp's analysis centers on humanist pedagogy as a mechanism for creating people capable of governing both themselves and others. Acknowledging the ways in which authors such as Sidney, Shakespeare, and Milton advance their own work by appealing to this vision, Glimp argues that their texts allow us to read the scope and limits of this generative ideal, its capacity to reinforce order and to become excessive and destabilizing. His work provides unprecedented insight into the role of fantasies of nonbiological reproduction in early modern political theory, government practice, and literary production. David Glimp is assistant professor of English at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

[more]

Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Richard Tilden Rapp

Harvard University Press, 1976

One of the oldest, most commanding topics in early modern economic history--Venice's fall from commercial supremacy to relative insignificance--is here examined. What emerges is what many scholars have come to suspect: the catch-all phrase "the decline of Venice" embodies a myth. Rapp explains the paradox of seventeenth-century Venice, a republic that experienced a relative economic decline in commerce and industry with no absolute decline in overall income. In this systematic approach to the subject of economic decline, Rapp focuses on economic factors common to all Venetian enterprise: labor supply and quality, technology and capital employment, foreign demand, and government policy. The statistical backbone of this massively documented book is an employment census of the city derived from the records of the Naval Personnel Administration, the Collegio da Milizia da Mar. Throughout the book, many analytical insights are offered about population, guilds, technology, and economic policy in early modern Europe.

[more]

Inequality in Early America

Carla Gardina Pestana

Dartmouth College Press, 2015

This book was designed as a collaborative effort to satisfy a long-felt need to pull together many important but separate inquiries into the nature and impact of inequality in colonial and revolutionary America. It also honors the scholarship of Gary Nash, who has contributed much of the leading work in this field. The 15 contributors, who constitute a Who's Who of those who have made important discoveries and reinterpretations of this issue, include Mary Beth Norton on women's legal inequality in early America; Neal Salisbury on Puritan missionaries and Native Americans; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on elite and poor women's work in early Boston; Peter Wood and Philip Morgan on early American slavery; as well as Gary Nash himself writing on Indian/white history. This book is a vital contribution to American self-understanding and to historical analysis.

[more]

The Information Master

Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System

Jacob Soll

University of Michigan Press, 2011

"Colbert has long been celebrated as Louis XIV's minister of finance, trade, and industry. More recently, he has been viewed as his minister of culture and propaganda. In this lively and persuasive book, Jake Soll has given us a third Colbert, the information manager."
---Peter Burke, University of Cambridge

"Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With a stunning attention to detail Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing
royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long
overdue and compelling."
---Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles

"Nowadays we all know that information is the key to power, and that the masters of information rule the world. Jacob Soll teaches us that Jean-Baptiste Colbert had grasped this principle three and a half centuries ago, and used it to construct a new kind of state. This imaginative, erudite, and powerfully written book re-creates the history of libraries and archives in early modern Europe, and ties them in a novel and convincing way to the new statecraft of Europe's absolute monarchs."
---Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

"Brilliantly researched, superbly told, and timely, Soll's story is crucial for the history of the modern state."
---Keith Baker, Stanford University

When Louis XIV asked his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert---the man who was to oversee the building of Versailles and the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the navy, the Paris police force, and French industry---to build a large-scale administrative government, Colbert created an unprecedented information system for political power. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state and was a precursor to industrial intelligence and Internet search engines.

Soll's innovative look at Colbert's rise to power argues that his practice of collecting knowledge originated from techniques of church scholarship and from Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship, finance, and library science. With his connection of interdisciplinary approaches---regarding accounting, state administration, archives, libraries, merchant techniques, ecclesiastical culture, policing, and humanist pedagogy---Soll has written an innovative book that will redefine not only the history of the reign of Louis XIV and information science but also the study of political and economic history.

Jacket illustration: Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), Philippe de Champaigne, 1655, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Wildenstein Foundation, Inc., 1951 (51.34). Photograph © 2003 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[more]

Infortunios de Alonso Ramirez / The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramirez (1690)

Annotated Bilingual Edition

Buscaglia-Salgado, José F

Rutgers University Press, 2018

In 2009, 319 years after its publication, and following over a century of copious scholarly speculation about the work, José F. Buscaglia is the first scholar to furnish direct and irrefutable proof that the story contained in the Infortunios/Misfortunes is based on the life and times of a man certifiably named Alonso Ramírez, who was shipwrecked on Herradura Point in the Coast of Yucatán on Sunday September 18, 1689. This first bilingual edition of the Infortunios/Misfortunes reports the findings of almost two decades of sustained research in pursuit, on land and by sea, of a most elusive historical character who was, as we now can attest with all degree of certainty, the first American known to have circumnavigated the globe. Captured by pirates, shipwrecked, and eventually rescued and sent on his way, this is one man’s story of his unanticipated voyage around the Early Modern world. With transcription, translation, notes, maps, images, and critical essay by Jose F. Buscaglia-Salgado, this Rutgers edition is the most complete and authoritative study on a work that grants us privileged access to the intricacies of early American subjectivity.

[more]

Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation

Shannon McHugh

University of Delaware Press, 2011

The enduring "black legend" of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades following Trent have been mostly overlooked in Italian literary studies, in particular. The thirteen essays of Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation present a radical reconsideration of literary production in post-Tridentine Italy. With particular attention to the much-maligned tradition of spiritual literature, the volume’s contributors weave literary analysis together with religion, theater, art, music, science, and gender to demonstrate that the literature of this period not only merits study but is positively innovative. Contributors include such renowned critics as Virginia Cox and Amedeo Quondam, two of the leading scholars on the Italian Counter-Reformation.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

[more]

Interwoven

Andean Lives in Colonial Ecuador’s Textile Economy

Rachel Corr

University of Arizona Press, 2018

In the 1600s, Marcos Cunamasi, an indigenous man in Pelileo, Ecuador, hid his child to protect him from officials who would put the boy to work in the textile mill. Cunamasi was forced to turn him over. Because his young son couldn’t keep up with spinning his quota of wool per day, Cunamasi helped so the child wouldn’t be whipped. After working a year, Cunamasi was paid a shirt and a hat.

Interwoven is the untold story of indigenous people’s historical experience in colonial Ecuador’s textile economy. It focuses on the lives of Native Andean families in Pelileo, a town dominated by one of Quito’s largest and longest-lasting textile mills. Quito’s textile industry developed as a secondary market to supply cloth to mining centers in the Andes; thus, the experience of indigenous people in Pelileo is linked to the history of mining in Bolivia and Peru.

Although much has been written about colonial Quito’s textile economy, Rachel Corr provides a unique perspective by putting indigenous voices at the center of that history. Telling the stories of Andean families of Pelileo, she traces their varied responses to historical pressures over three hundred years; the responses range from everyday acts to the historical transformation of culture through ethnogenesis. These stories of ordinary Andean men and women provide insight into the lived experience of the people who formed the backbone of Quito’s textile industry.

[more]

Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance

Katharine Eisaman Maus

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Katharine Eisaman Maus explores Renaissance writers' uneasy preoccupation with the inwardness and invisibility of truth. The perceived discrepancy between a person's outward appearance and inward disposition, she argues, deeply influenced the ways English Renaissance dramatists and poets conceived of the theater, imagined dramatic characters, and reflected upon their own creativity.

Reading works by Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton in conjuction with sectarian polemics, gynecological treatises, and accounts of criminal prosecutions, Maus delineates unexplored connections among religious, legal, sexual, and theatrical ideas of inward truth. She reveals what was at stake—ethically, politically, epistemologically, and theologically—when a writer in early modern England appealed to the difference between external show and interior authenticity. Challenging the recent tendency to see early modern selfhood as defined in wholly public terms, Maus argues that Renaissance dramatists continually payed homage to aspects of inner life they felt could never be manifested onstage.

[more]

The Irish Franciscans in Prague 1629-1786

Jan Parez and Hedvika Kucharová

Karolinum Press, 2015

At the end of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I forced the Irish Franciscans into exile. Of the four continental provinces to which the Irish Franciscans fled, the Prague Franciscan College of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was the largest in its time. This monograph documents this intense point of contact between two small European lands, Ireland and Bohemia. The Irish exiles changed the course of Bohemian history in significant ways, both positive—the Irish students and teachers of medicine who contributed to Bohemia’s culture and sciences—and negative—the Irish officers who participated in the murder of Albrecht of Valdštejn and their successors who served in the Imperial forces.
Dealing with a hitherto largely neglected theme, Parez and Kucharová attempt to place the Franciscan College within Bohemian history and to document the activities of its members. This wealth of historical material from the Czech archives, presented in English for the first time, will be of great aid for international researchers, particularly those interested in Bohemia or the Irish diaspora.

[more]

The Iron Princess

Amalia Elisabeth and the Thirty Years War

Tryntje Helfferich

Harvard University Press, 2013

Thrust into power in the midst of the bloodiest conflict Europe had ever experienced, Amalia Elisabeth fought to save her country, her Calvinist church, and her children’s inheritance. Tryntje Helfferich’s vivid portrait reveals how this unique and embattled ruler used her diplomatic gifts to play the great powers of Europe against one another during the Thirty Years War, while raising one of the most powerful and effective fighting forces on the continent.

Stranded in exile after the death of her husband, Amalia Elisabeth stymied the maneuvers of male relatives and advisors who hoped to seize control of the affairs of her tiny German state of Hesse-Cassel. Unshakable in her religious faith and confident in her own capacity to rule, the princess crafted a cunning strategy to protect her interests. Despite great personal tragedy, challenges to her rule, and devastating losses to her people and lands, Amalia Elisabeth wielded her hard-won influence to help shape the new Europe that arose in the war’s wake. She ended her reign in triumph, having secured the birthright of her children and the legalization of her church. The Iron Princess restores to view one of the most compelling political figures of her time, a woman once widely considered the heroine of the seventeenth century.

[more]

Italian and Spanish Art 1600-1750

Sources and Documents

Robert Enggass

Northwestern University Press, 1993

The Baroque period was crucial for the development of art theory and the advancement of the artistic academy. This collection of primary sources brings this important period to life with significant documents and texts. It conveniently assembles major texts, which are otherwise available only in scattered publications. The lives of leading artists--Caravaggio, El Greco, among others---are discussed by their contemporaries, while Bellori, Galileo, Pascoli, and others write on art theory and practice. The documents provide fascinating glimpses of the period's artistic self-image.

[more]