Irish soldiers in Loreto and Rome: a pilgrimage, and an employment request c.1609

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 587-598
Author(s):  
Brian Mac Cuarta
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Persecution ◽  
North East ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Military Forces ◽  
Family Narrative ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
Prospective Employer

Scholarly attention to the Irish Catholic experience on the Continent in the early Stuart era is increasing.1 Interest in Irish pilgrimage to continental sanctuaries in the early modern period is one facet of that broader historiographical trend. However the surviving evidence tends to favour the travels of those of higher social standing, and it is their experience which has received attention.2 The present text, by contrast, arose from the journey to Rome of two brothers, soldiers who had been serving in the Irish regiment in Flanders. Having visited the Marian shrine of Loreto (north-east of Rome) on the way, while in Rome they made a petition to be employed in the papal military service. Their request is at several levels. Irish participation in Spanish military forces both in Flanders and Spain in the early seventeenth century has been of interest to scholars in recent decades; Irish involvement with the papal military forces in the same period is less well noted.3 Early modern soldiers regularly faced unemployment arising from a cessation of hostilities; in the case of two soldiers in the Spanish Netherlands, this document throws light on the need to find a new employer, and on strategies adopted to that end. Further, in presenting themselves to the Pope as a prospective employer, the petition illustrates how Irish soldier exiles fashioned an assertive Catholic identity for themselves, in which the family’s experience of religious persecution in their homeland was linked with subsequent military service against heretics on the Continent. Hence the significance of the text presented here. The brothers’ army career was outlined, with referees indicated, and some possible openings in the papal forces were suggested. These professional elements were integrated into a family narrative of persecution for the Catholic faith, and personal religious devotion, with a view to making an informed request for employment in papal service.

Devotional Landscapes: God, Saints and the Natural World in Early Modern Ireland

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 217-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Short Supply ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
The Relationship

Reconstructing the relationship of the inhabitants of early modern Ireland with the natural world and its Creator is both a difficult and a straightforward task. At one level those who lived in Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, had much in common with other contemporary Europeans, and they shared similar ideas about the existence of God, his actions in creating the world and how that world worked. At another level the relationship between the inhabitants of early modern Ireland and the natural world is rather different from that observable in other places. In terms of pilgrimage, the inhabitants of Ireland before the Reformation in the early sixteenth century had litde interest in visiting corporeal relics, and body parts of saints were in short supply in Ireland by comparison with other European countries. Rather, the devout preferred to visit places in the natural world that had reputed associations with a saint, such as a well created by a saint or a cave where he had lived. Why this should be so is difficult to explain, but it certainly created an experience of the natural world which, though not unique to Ireland, was certainly more intense there. In turn, this affected local religious experiences as they were reshaped through the process of religious change in the early modern period, giving a particular hue to the local forms of religious devotion practised by both Catholics and Protestants. This essay aims to reveal something of the distinctive traits of local religion that formed as a result of the conscious interaction of the inhabitants of Ireland with God’s creation.

scholarly journals A Community of Councillors: Tudor Government and Prosopography

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connor Huddlestone
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Executive Board ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Collective Biography ◽  
Patterns Of Interaction

The Tudor privy council was the executive board of the English state and its members the leading political players of the era. Historians of Tudor politics have traditionally focused on kings and great men. When they deal with the privy council, they treat councillors in isolation, only exploring their links with others during moments of political strife. The result is a historiography dominated by faction and division. A prosopographical approach – a form of collective biography that helps identify the shared elements in a group’s experiences, and foregrounds the relations between its members - allows us to look at this group of men as a group, and in so doing to see them differently. Their many shared experiences - a childhood spent together at the same grammar school, a tour of Europe’s universities as young adults, joint military service, marriage into the same family, or time spent together hunting, hawking, and feasting - makes it much harder to divide councillors into neat opposing camps. More broadly, this paper uses the case-study of Tudor privy councillors to illustrate how tools taken from the Digital Humanities can enhance and expand the prosopographical approach: in particular modern relational database software moves us beyond simply identifying common themes in the lives of the members of this group, and allows us to explore patterns of interaction between them. Such an approach, moreover, has the potential to enhance our understanding of many other groups of the early modern period. ​

Material Piety: Science and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century Portugal

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 1162-1209
Author(s):  
Nuno Castel-Branco
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Religious Devotion

In seventeenth-century Lisbon, Jesuit mathematicians taught their students how to build blood-ejecting crucifixes and similar religious devices. Together with the activities of experts in the canonization of Isabel of Portugal and in other contexts, these situations represent rare instances in which religious devotion interacted directly with science. Informed by the histories of science, art, and religion, this essay argues that a piety centered on materiality fostered these scientific practices, which became religious ministries in themselves. This analysis brings new light to lasting debates on science and religion and to the purpose of practicing science in the early modern period.

Pain and Memory in the Formation of Early Modern Habitus

2019 ◽  
Vol 146 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-90
Author(s):  
Mitchell Merback
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Memory Training ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Virtual Self ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
The Middle Ages

Between the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, pain and memory became interdependent in three domains of social and religious life: religious devotion, education, and criminal justice. The grounds for this affiliation were prepared by a training of individuals in the control of affect and the acceptance of memory training as a regimen of virtual self-wounding, often facilitated by violent imagery. Across the three domains examined here Christian subjectivity was quietly reformed, and an embodied habitus inculcated, to meet the demands of an age no longer anchored in unquestioned truths.

scholarly journals The third army: wandering soldiers and the negotiation of parliamentary authority, 1642–51

2018 ◽  
pp. 137-155
Author(s):  
David J. Appleby
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Local Officials ◽  
Do So

Historians have long been interested in vagrancy during the early modern period, and the treatment meted out to travellers by local officials. However, despite the fact that so many vagrants were conscripted for military service, little work has been done on how they fared during the British Civil Wars. The closely-related topic of ‘wandering soldiers’ remains largely unexplored, despite the fact that they featured prominently in early modern ‘rogue’ literature. Demobilised veterans and deserters did not simply go home, not least because large numbers of conscripts, being unskilled and unmarried, had little reason to do so. The chapter investigates the scale, complexity and political significance of the problems which resulted, and why, given the fact that such individuals were potentially far more dangerous than normal vagrants, the moral panics of earlier decades were not repeated.

The Pope and His Electors

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles Pattenden
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Impact

This chapter explains who the cardinals were and how their priorities for the papacy evolved over the course of the early modern period. It is organized around discussions of how the cardinal developed as a concept and of the cardinals’ key relationships: with the pope himself, with their own families, with the Catholic faith, and with secular powers. The chapter explains how Italian elites colonized the papacy from the fifteenth century onwards, adapting it to serve their own political ends, and how this changed profiles and priorities within the Sacred College in the process. It discusses the impact of religious changes, in particular the spread of Protestantism, on cardinals and their spiritual mission, and shows how changes in the papacy’s international position impacted the cardinals’ perceptions of their role.

scholarly journals Religious Refugees or Confessional Migrants? Perspectives from Early Modern Ireland

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Critical Aspect ◽  
Religious Persecution ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Church Service

Abstract Early Modern Ireland was a society deeply influenced by contrasting currents of mobility. Indeed, together with the Netherlands, it can be suggested that Ireland was the Western European society most shaped by confessional migration. Uniquely in Europe, the kingdom witnessed the effective replacement of its existing elites by immigrants whose religious affiliation marked them out as distinct from the mass of the inhabitants. As migrants into Ireland, Protestants derived substantial advantages from their religious identity. Ironically, however, it was the moment of their forced flight in 1641–42 which became a touchstone of historical memory and identity for this community, commemorated by an annual church service on 23 October, the date of the outbreak of the original rebellion. Similarly, for the Irish military, merchants and clerics who constituted the backbone of a very significant Irish Catholic diaspora during the Early Modern period, an inheritance of religious persecution became a vital and cherished aspect of identity and a critical aspect of the perception of them by their host societies, thus blurring the lines between the categories of religious refugees and confessional migrants.

scholarly journals Scottish Lettering of the 16th century

2018 ◽  
Vol 147 ◽  
pp. 219-241
Author(s):  
Aidan Harrison ◽  
Charles J Burnett
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
James Iv ◽  
National Significance

Surviving visual culture from the early modern period that can be described as particularly Scottish in style is scarce. As a result, any evidence of such artistry is of national significance. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to a form of lettering which was used for the display of short inscriptions and initials in Scotland throughout the 16th century. Surviving examples are almost exclusively carved in relief in durable wood and stone. This distinctive letterform is drawn from the transitional styles which briefly appeared at the end of the 15th century as French artists and scribes transferred their allegiance from their traditional ornate Gothic capitals to the bold, simple Roman forms of the Renaissance. While a number of experimental letterforms fleetingly appeared elsewhere across northern Europe, Scottish scholars absorbed these new influences in France and developed them into a distinctive form which persisted in Scotland for over a century. After its first known appearance at the marriage of King James IV to Margaret Tudor in Edinburgh in 1503, the evidence suggests that the use of Scottish Lettering became confined to Aberdeen and the north-east, primarily in pre Reformation ecclesiastical applications. Following the Reformation, it became largely restricted to secular and funerary inscriptions.

From Craft to Institution: Accounting in Italy from the Middle ages to the Early Modern Period

2012 ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Volkova
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Technical Standards ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Professional Field

The article describes the evolution of accounting from the simple registration technique to economic and social institution in medieval Italy. We used methods of institutional analysis and historical research. It is shown that the institutionalization of accounting had been completed by the XIV century, when it became a system of codified technical standards, scholar discipline and a professional field. We examine the interrelations of this process with business environment, political, social, economic and cultural factors of Italy by the XII—XVI centuries. Stages of institutionalization are outlined.

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