Results by title

342 books match the query '16th Century' and 24 start with a

Sort by

A Feast of Words

Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance

Michel Jeanneret

University of Chicago Press, 1991

The banquet gives rise to a special moment when thought and the senses—words and food—enhance each other. Throughout history, the ideal of the symposium has reconciled the angel and the beast in the human, renewing the interdependence between the mouth that speaks and the mouth that eats. Michel Jeanneret's lively book explores the paradigm of the banquet as a guide to significant tendencies in Renaissance Humanist culture and shows how this culture in turn illuminates the tensions between physical and mental pleasures. Ranging widely over French, Italian, German, and Latin texts, Jeanneret not only investigates the meal as a narrative artefact but enquires as well into aspects of sixteenth-century anthropology and aesthetics.

[more]

A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague, C. 1615

Abraham David

University of Alabama Press, 1993

Translated by Leon J. Weinberger with Dena Ordan

"This slender anonymous work, spanning 1389 to 1611, presents the priorities and concerns of a Jewish community straddling the late medieval and early modern periods. Ample footnotes and explanations provide the lay reader with sufficient background to understand the references to historical events and figures, to ideologies and to institutions. A comprehensive introduction presents the realities of Prague and Bohemia, as well as offering a helpful discussion of the chronicle and other contemporary Jewish accounts."
—Conservative Jewish Quarterly

"In about 1615 an anonymous Jew from Prague composed a short Hebrew chronicle to recount 'the expulsions, miracles, and other occurrences befalling [the Jews] in Prague and the other lands of our long exile.' Abraham David discovered the manuscript [and] added glosses, historical notes, and an introduction. . . . The chronicle, with its brief annual entries, is not a continuous narrative, but does give a feeling of immediacy, like a newspaper."
—Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry

[more]

A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo

Assimilating a Minority

Linda Martz

University of Michigan Press, 2003

A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo addresses the fortunes of Jewish families who converted to Catholicism in fifteenth-century Spain. From the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, their careers, successes, and misfortunes are traced as they confront institutional and societal prejudices in the form of the Spanish Inquisition and pure blood statutes.
Linda M. Martz focuses on families that were immersed in the worlds of business and finance. They formed the backbone of the trade industry and, during the economic expansion of the sixteenth century, enjoyed a high degree of affluence. The seventeenth century, however, brought harder times. How these families rose to positions of commercial eminence and then adapted to this economic downturn is one of the questions addressed in this insightful book.
A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo relies heavily on archival evidence--notarial, parish, and city records--that offers new insights into the families' histories. Business endeavors, marriage alliances, involvement in local politics, and the pursuit of improved social status are all subjected to Martz's keen analysis.
These families appear to have been well integrated into their contemporary society; aside from their business and financial activities, many were members of the city's governing council. But how well did they integrate with the lower classes? Assimilating minorities in the majority culture is a task that confronts most modern societies, so the experience of Spain and this particular minority may serve as an example of how earlier societies viewed and confronted this challenge.
This book will appeal to historians of medieval and Renaissance Spain and those interested in the Inquisition's effect on Renaissance Spain. It will also prove to be indispensable for those interested in the history of the Jewish race, as well as for those pursuing the question of marginalization.
Linda M. Martz is an independent historian as well as a freelance editor and writer.

[more]

A New-World Collection of Polyphony for Holy Week and the Salve Service

Guatemala City, Cathedral Archive, Music MS 4

Edited by Robert J. Snow

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Following the conquest of Mexico by Cortés and much of Central America by Alvarado, cathedral churches were established throughout the region, all with European-style polyphonic choirs. Among the most important of these early centers of Spanish culture was the cathedral of Guatemala City, where polyphony was already in use in the 1540s.

Shortly after 1600, the organist and choir director of the cathedral collected, organized, and copied into choirbooks all of the then-extant music used by the choir. The manuscript presented here in modern edition, one of at least five choirbooks prepared at the time, contains a number of otherwise unknown works by such major Old World composers as Francisco Guerrero and Cristóbal de Morales. Significant works by Hernando Franco and Pedro Bermúdez, choirmasters of the Guatemala City Cathedral, are also included. The manuscript presents a unified repertory for Holy Week and for the Salve services in Lent, including four settings of the Passion, for which the Spanish were famous throughout Christendom. Some of the works predate the sixteenth-century reform of the Roman Breviary and Missal, among them the original versions of several Vespers hymns and Magnificat settings by Guerrero that are otherwise known only in later versions found in Spanish sources. An extensive historical introduction by Robert J. Snow discusses the formation of the cathedral's musical repertory and illuminates both Old and New World practices of sixteenth-century Spanish liturgical music.

[more]

A Power to Do Justice

Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law

Bradin Cormack

University of Chicago Press, 2008

English law underwent rapid transformation in the sixteenth century, in response to the Reformation and also to heightened litigation and legal professionalization. As the common law became more comprehensive and systematic, the principle of jurisdiction came under particular strain. When the common law engaged with other court systems in England, when it encountered territories like Ireland and France, or when it confronted the ocean as a juridical space, the law revealed its qualities of ingenuity and improvisation. In other words, as Bradin Cormack argues, jurisdictional crisis made visible the law’s resemblance to the literary arts.
A Power to Do Justice shows how Renaissance writers engaged the practical and conceptual dynamics of jurisdiction, both as a subject for critical investigation and as a frame for articulating literature’s sense of itself. Reassessing the relation between English literature and law from More to Shakespeare, Cormack argues that where literary texts attend to jurisdiction, they dramatize how boundaries and limits are the very precondition of law’s power, even as they clarify the forms of intensification that make literary space a reality.

Tracking cultural responses to Renaissance jurisdictional thinking and legal centralization, A Power to Do Justice makes theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological contributions that set a new standard for law and the humanities and for the cultural history of early modern law and literature.

[more]

A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add 17,492)

Edited by Raymond Siemens, Karin Armstrong, and Constance Crompton

Iter Press, 2015

Described by Colin Burrow as 'the richest surviving record of early Tudor poetry and of the literary activities of 16th-century women,' the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add. 17492) is a verse miscellany belonging to the 1530s and early 1540s, including some 194 items including complete poems, verse fragments and excerpts from longer works, anagrams, and other ephemeral jottings attributed to Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Lady Margaret Douglas, Richard Hattfield, Mary Fitzroy (née Howard), Thomas Howard, Edmund Knyvett, Anthony Lee, and Henry Stewart, as well transcriptions of the work of others or original works by prominent court figures such as Mary Shelton, Lady Margaret Douglas, Mary (Howard) Fitzroy, Lord Thomas Howard, and, possibly, Anne Boleyn. This edition publishes the contents of the manuscript in their entirety, documenting well the manuscript's place as the earliest sustained example in English of men and women writing together in a community.

[more]

A Spectrum of Unfreedom

Captives and Slaves in the Ottoman Empire

Leslie Peirce

Central European University Press, 2021

Without the labor of the captives and slaves, the Ottoman empire could not have attained and maintained its strength in early modern times. With Anatolia as the geographic focus, Leslie Peirce searches for the voices of the unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at the time, and legal texts.

Unfree persons comprised two general populations: slaves and captives. Mostly household workers, slaves lived in a variety of circumstances, from squalor to luxury. Their duties varied with the status of their owner. Slave status might not last a lifetime, as Islamic law and Ottoman practice endorsed freeing one’s slave.

Captives were typically seized in raids, generally to disappear, their fates unknown. Victims rarely returned home, despite efforts of their families and neighbors to recover them. The reader learns what it was about the Ottoman environment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that offered some captives the opportunity to improve the conditions of their bondage. The book describes imperial efforts to fight against the menace of captive-taking despite the widespread corruption among the state’s own officials, who had their own interest in captive labor.

From the fortunes of captives and slaves the book moves to their representation in legend, historical literature, and law, where, fortunately, both captors and their prey are present.

[more]

A Taste for the Foreign

Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction

Ellen R. Welch

University of Delaware Press, 2011

A Taste for the Foreign examines foreignness as a crucial aesthetic category for the development of prose fiction from Jacques Amyot’s 1547 translation of The Ethiopian Story to Antoine Galland’s early eighteenth-century version of The Thousand and One Nights. While fantastic storylines and elements of magic were increasingly shunned by a neo-classicist literary culture that valued verisimilitude above all else, writers and critics surmised that the depiction of exotic lands could offer a superior source for the novelty, variety, and marvelousness that constituted fiction’s appeal. In this sense, early modern fiction presents itself as privileged site for thinking through the literary and cultural stakes of exoticism, or the taste for the foreign. Long before the term exoticism came into common parlance in France, fiction writers thus demonstrated their understanding of the special kinds of aesthetic pleasure produced by evocations of foreignness, developing techniques to simulate those delights through imitations of the exotic. As early modern readers eagerly consumed travel narratives, maps, and international newsletters, novelists discovered ways to blur the distinction between true and imaginary representations of the foreign, tantalizing readers with an illusion of learning about the faraway lands that captured their imaginations.

This book analyzes the creative appropriations of those scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places. Concentrating on the most successful examples of some of the most important sub-genres of prose fiction in the long seventeenth century—heroic romances, shorter urban novels, fictional memoirs, and extraordinary voyages—the book examines how these types of fiction creatively appropriate the scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places.

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

[more]

A Thomas More Source Book

Gerard B. Wegemer

Catholic University of America Press, 2004

This Source Book brings together classic texts by and about Thomas More--poet, scholar, statesman, family man, educational reformer, philosopher, historian, and saint

[more]

Across the Green Sea

Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

University of Texas Press, 2024

A history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa.

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultural exchange and transformation. Using a variety of texts and documents in multiple Asian and European languages, Across the Green Sea looks at the history of the ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints: western India; the Red Sea and Mecca; the Persian Gulf; East Africa; and Kerala.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam sets the scene for this region starting with the withdrawal of China's Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century. Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant center and its dominated peripheries, Across the Green Sea demonstrates the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method pioneered by Subrahmanyam himself.

[more]

Advertising the Self in Renaissance France

Lemaire, Marot, and Rabelais

Scott Francis

University of Delaware Press, 2019

Advertising the Self in Renaissance France is a study of how authors and readers are represented in printed editions of three major literary figures of the French Renaissance: Jean Lemaire de Belges, Clément Marot, and François Rabelais. Print culture is marked by an anxiety of reception that became much more pronounced with increasingly anonymous and unpredictable readerships in the sixteenth century. To allay this anxiety, authors, as well as editors and printers, turned to self-fashioning in order to sell not only their books, but also particular ways of reading. They advertised correct modes of reading as transformative experiences that helped the actual reader attain the image of the ideal reader held up by the text and paratext, experiences provided by selfless authors. Thus, authorial personae were constructed around the self-fashioning offered to readers, creating an interdependent relationship that anticipated modern advertising.

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

[more]

Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address

Shira Brisman

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication.

In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.

[more]

Alluvium and Empire

The Archaeology of Colonial Resettlement and Indigenous Persistence on Peru’s North Coast

Parker VanValkenburgh

University of Arizona Press, 2021

Alluvium and Empire uncovers the stories of Indigenous people who were subject to one of the largest waves of forced resettlement in human history, the Reducción General. In 1569, Spanish administrators attempted to move at least 1.4 million Indigenous people into a series of planned towns called reducciones, with the goal of reshaping their households, communities, and religious practices. However, in northern Peru’s Zaña Valley, this process failed to go as the Spanish had planned. In Alluvium and Empire, Parker VanValkenburgh explores both the short-term processes and long-term legacies of Indigenous resettlement in this region, drawing particular attention to the formation of complex relationships between Indigenous communities, imperial institutions, and the dynamic environments of Peru’s north coast.

The volume draws on nearly ten years of field and archival research to craft a nuanced account of the Reducción General and its aftermath. Written at the intersections of history and archaeology, Alluvium and Empire at once bears witness to the violence of Spanish colonization and highlights Indigenous resilience in the aftermath of resettlement. In the process, VanValkenburgh critiques previous approaches to the study of empire and models a genealogical approach that attends to the open-ended—and often unpredictable—ways in which empires take shape.

[more]

An Errant Eye

Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France

Tom Conley

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

An Errant Eye studies how topography, the art of describing local space and place, developed literary and visual form in early modern France. Arguing for a "new poetics of space" ranging throughout French Renaissance poetry, prose, and cartography, Tom Conley performs dazzling readings of maps, woodcuts, and poems to plot a topographical shift in the late Renaissance in which space, subjectivity, and politics fall into crisis. He charts the paradox of a period whose demarcation of national space through cartography is rendered unstable by an ambient world of printed writing.

This tension, Conley demonstrates, cuts through literature and graphic matter of various shapes and forms-hybrid genres that include the comic novel, the emblem-book, the eclogue, sonnets, and the personal essay. An Errant Eye differs from historical treatments of spatial invention through Conley's argument that the topographic sensibility is one in which the ocular faculty, vital to the description of locale, is endowed with tact and touch.

Detailed close readings of Apian, Rabelais, Montaigne, and others empower the reader with a lively sense of the topographical impulse, deriving from Conley's own "errant eye," which is singularly discerning in attentiveness to the ambiguities of charted territory, the contours of woodcut images, and the complex combinations of word and figure in French Renaissance poetry, emblem, and politics.

[more]

Andean Cosmopolitans

Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court

By José Carlos de la Puente Luna

University of Texas Press, 2018

Winner, Premio Flora Tristán Al Mejor Libro, Peru Section, Latin American Studies Association, 2019

After the Spanish victories over the Inca claimed Tawantinsuyu for Charles V in the 1530s, native Andeans undertook a series of perilous trips from Peru to the royal court in Spain. Ranging from an indigenous commoner entrusted with delivering birds of prey for courtly entertainment to an Inca prince who spent his days amid titles, pensions, and other royal favors, these sojourners were both exceptional and paradigmatic. Together, they shared a conviction that the sovereign’s absolute authority would guarantee that justice would be done and service would receive its due reward. As they negotiated their claims with imperial officials, Amerindian peoples helped forge the connections that sustained the expanding Habsburg realm’s imaginary and gave the modern global age its defining character.

Andean Cosmopolitans recovers these travelers’ dramatic experiences, while simultaneously highlighting their profound influences on the making and remaking of the colonial world. While Spain’s American possessions became Spanish in many ways, the Andean travelers (in their cosmopolitan lives and journeys) also helped to shape Spain in the image and likeness of Peru. De la Puente brings remarkable insights to a narrative showing how previously unknown peoples and ideas created new power structures and institutions, as well as novel ways of being urban, Indian, elite, and subject. As indigenous people articulated and defended their own views regarding the legal and political character of the “Republic of the Indians,” they became state-builders of a special kind, cocreating the colonial order.

[more]

Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800

Peter N. Miller and François Louis, editors

University of Michigan Press, 2012

This book is a project in comparative history, but along two distinct axes, one historical and the other historiographical. Its purpose is to constructively juxtapose the early modern European and Chinese approaches to historical study that have been called "antiquarian." As an exercise in historical recovery, the essays in this volume amass new information about the range of antiquarian-type scholarship on the past, on nature, and on peoples undertaken at either end of the Eurasian landmass between 1500 and 1800. As a historiographical project, the book challenges the received---and often very much under conceptualized---use of the term "antiquarian" in both European and Chinese contexts. Readers will not only learn more about the range of European and Chinese scholarship on the past---and especially the material past---but they will also be able to integrate some of the historiographical observations and corrections into new ways of conceiving of the history of historical scholarship in Europe since the Renaissance, and to reflect on the impact of these European terms on Chinese approaches to the Chinese past. This comparison is a two-way street, with the European tradition clarified by knowledge of Chinese practices, and Chinese approaches better understood when placed alongside the European ones.

[more]

Aquinas and Analogy

Ralph McInerny

Catholic University of America Press, 1996

The basic distinctions McInerny introduces, his criticism of the central piece in the literature, Cajetan's De nominum analogia, the applications he makes to problems such as that of the nature of metaphysics or of logic, his knowledge of contemporary debates on related topics, combine to make his contribution unique

[more]

Architectural Involutions

Writing, Staging, and Building Space, c. 1435-1650

Mimi Yiu

Northwestern University Press, 2014

Winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars

Taking the reader on an inward journey from façades to closets, from physical to psychic space, Architectural Involutions offers an alternative genealogy of theater by revealing how innovations in architectural writing and practice transformed an early modern sense of interiority. The book launches from a matrix of related “platforms”—a term that in early modern usage denoted scaffolds, stages, and draftsmen’s sketches—to situate Alberti, Shakespeare, Jonson, and others within a landscape of spatial and visual change.

As the English house underwent a process of inward folding, replacing a logic of central assembly with one of dissemination, the subject who negotiated this new scenography became a flashpoint of conflict in both domestic and theatrical arenas. Combining theory with archival findings, Mimi Yiu reveals an emergent desire to perform subjectivity, to unfold an interior face to an admiring public. Highly praised for its lucid writing, comprehensive supplementary material, and engaging tone, Architectural Involutions was the winner of the 2016 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars.

[more]

Arcticologies

Early Modern Actions for Our Warmer World

Lowell Duckert

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

Exploring the frozen past to rethink our warming future

Do we really know what cold is? In Arcticologies, Lowell Duckert delves into early modern European texts to trace how representations of frigidity from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have contributed to historical understandings of climate and contemporary debates on climate change. Arguing that human culture and science are, in fact, indebted to the cold, Duckert suggests that these early depictions offer critical terms for advancing the aims of climate-change activism and assisting in counterapocalyptic thinking.

An imaginative and intellectual journey, Arcticologies reveals the enduring role of cold in wide-ranging storytelling traditions. It draws on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Othello and the works of Thomas Dekker, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes and is informed throughout by contemporary Indigenous writing, including that of Sheila Watt-Cloutier and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. In reflecting on these assorted accounts, Duckert sees cold as not only an environmental hardship but a source of cultural creativity and resilience, highlighting moments of collaboration between humans and the icy world, from arctic exploration to urban fairs on frozen rivers.

Cold, Duckert makes clear, is more than the absence of warmth. Situating our contemporary obsession with impending planetary meltdown within the mazelike arcticologies of the past, Duckert shows how early modern cold brought about forms of curiosity, vocabulary, and interspecies relationality that can serve us today. In doing so, he asks us to identify what has been lost and who is at risk in today’s thinning cold—while also urging us to imagine alternative futures focused not on inevitable and total collapse but on adaptation and preserving what remains.

[more]

Arms and the Woman

Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance

Francesca D'Alessandro Behr

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Arms and the Woman: Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance by Francesca D’Alessandro Behr focuses on the classical reception in the works of female authors active in Venice during the Early Modern Age. Even in this relatively liberal city, women had restricted access to education and were subject to deep-seated cultural prejudices, but those who read and wrote were able, in part, to overcome those limitations.

In this study, Behr explores the work of Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella and demonstrates how they used knowledge of texts by Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle to systematically reanalyze the biased patterns apparent both in the romance epic genre and contemporary society. Whereas these classical texts were normally used to bolster the belief in female inferiority and the status quo, Fonte and Marinella used them to envision societies structured according to new, egalitarian ethics. Reflecting on the humanist representation of virtue, Fonte and Marinella insisted on the importance of peace, mercy, and education for women. These authors took up the theme of the equality of genders and participated in the Renaissance querelle des femmes, promoting women’s capabilities and nature.

[more]

Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600

Pamela O. Long

Oregon State University Press, 2011

[more]

At the Margins

Minority Groups in Premodern Italy

Stephen J. Milner

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Slaves, foundlings, prostitutes, nuns, homosexuals, exiles, the elderly, and mountain communities - such groups stood at the margins of society in premodern Italy. But where precisely the margins were was not so easily determined. Examining these minorities as the buffer zones between more readily recognizable centers, At the Margins explores identity as a process rather than a fixed entity, stressing the multiplicity of groups to which individuals belonged. By tracing the shifting relations of social margins to centers in Italy between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries - and showing how these shifts in turn relate to social order and identity formation - the authors challenge entrenched ideas about the nature of the Renaissance and its role in shaping modernity. Behind much cultural theory lies a critique of the centrality of modernity and its foundations in the discourse of Renaissance humanism. And yet, as this volume reveals, the insights of contemporary cultural theory serve to expose the flaws in this picture of cultural hegemony and, in decentering the Renaissance, return it to the heart of cultural debate.

[more]

Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun

María Vela y Cueto

Iter Press, 2016

When María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.

[more]