The Social Place of a German Renaissance Artist: Hans Baldung Grien (1484/85–1545) at Strasbourg

1975 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Brady

In Jakob Burckhardt's classic vision of the emergence of a new, individualistic consciousness in Renaissance Italy, the artist took his place behind the tyrant as one of the early escapees from the crumbling prisons of medieval corporate institutions. Although the picture of his progress from craftsman to free professional is more nuanced and qualified in the recent literature, the Italian artist continues to enjoy his reputation as one of the few permanent beneficiaries of the Renaissance. As the Wittkowers have written: “But the new day came when artists began to revolt against the hierarchical order of which they were an integral part—a day when they regarded the organization meant to protect their interests as prison rather than shelter.”1 At Florence, where artists first achieved a new self-consciousness as theorists and men of letters, private patronage supplied the wealth for a new level of status, higher than that of the craftsman, and weakened the ties of guild life. Not that Florentine artists of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invariably became either successful businessmen or bohemians—though both types could be found there and elsewhere in Italy—nor did they revolt against corporate institutions altogether. But their new organization, the Accademia del Disegno, resembled the old guild structure only superficially and was, as its name suggests, a professional association uniting the artistic crafts rather than a type of guild.2 If the sixteenth century Italian artist lacked the social prestige of the lawyer, the notary, or the physician, neither was he any longer lumped together with the cobbler, the stonemason, or the apothecary.

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Christopoulos

What did abortion mean in late Renaissance Italy? In what ways did the reforming Church conceive of it and try to regulate its practice? This study explores attitudes toward abortion in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century through the lens of confessional discourses and practices. In the last three decades of the century, bishops and popes attempted to eradicate the practice of abortion by imposing shaming and increasingly severe punishments for its procurers. However, such initiatives were hindered by the social and practical consequences of bringing procurers of abortion to light. The ecclesiastical establishment had to rely on the secret space of the confessional to reform this aspect of morality. Exploring the negotiations between theological pronouncements and the sociopolitical realities of ecclesiastical administration, this article draws attention to the ambiguities inherent in early modern conceptions of abortion and contends that these led to inconsistent responses among Counter-Reformation ecclesiastical authorities.


Vulcan ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-65
Author(s):  
Barton C. Hacker

David Ayalon’s classic and highly influential 1956 study of Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom left some surprising questions unexamined. He attributed Ottoman victory primarily to Ottoman firearms, while Mamluks stubbornly clung to the arms of the mounted archer. But despite the technological underpinnings of his thesis, Ayalon discussed the technology of neither the traditional warfare of mounted archery nor the newfangled warfare of gunpowder weapons. Was Mamluk mounted archery actually inferior to Ottoman firearms? This essay addresses the technical basis both for the mounted archery central to Mamluk military prowess and the characteristics of late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth century firearms adopted by the Ottomans, both in the context of the social technology of Muslim military slavery. By opening the black box of Mamluk and Ottoman military technology, this essay seeks to show more precisely in what ways military technology did and did not shape the outcome of the struggle.


1959 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 195-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles G. Nauert

The curious northerner who had been attracted by the culture of Renaissance Italy and who sooner or later managed to fulfill his desire to visit that land in person was certainly one of the most interesting and most significant types of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Historians have found his type interesting and significant partly because they desire to understand the spread of intellectual influences from one region to another, and notably from Italy to northern Europe, and partly because these visitors from the north through their writings give insights into intellectual conditions in Italy itself. The type of the humanistic visitor from the north was already well established by the time that Erasmus began his three-year residence in the peninsula in 1506, for Erasmus was only following the example of many of his humanistic acquaintances, especially his English friends, the Oxford reformers.


2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Donald Beecher

This is a study of a Renaissance artist and his patrons, but with an added complication, insofar as Leone de' Sommi, the gifted academician and playwright in the employ of the dukes of Mantua in the second half of the sixteenth century, was Jewish and a lifelong promoter and protector of his community. The article deals with the complex relationship between the court and the Jewish "università" concerning the drama and the way in which dramatic performances also became part of the political, judicial and social negotiations between the two parties, as well as a study of Leone's role as playwright and negotiator during a period that was arguably one of the best of times for the Jews of Mantua.


Author(s):  
Koji Yamamoto

Projects began to emerge during the sixteenth century en masse by promising to relieve the poor, improve the balance of trade, raise money for the Crown, and thereby push England’s imperial ambitions abroad. Yet such promises were often too good to be true. This chapter explores how the ‘reformation of abuses’—a fateful slogan associated with England’s break from Rome—came to be used widely in economic contexts, and undermined promised public service under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. The negative image of the projector soon emerged in response, reaching both upper and lower echelons of society. The chapter reconstructs the social circulation of distrust under Charles, and considers its repercussions. To do this it brings conceptual tools developed in social psychology and sociology to bear upon sources conventionally studied in literary and political history.


Author(s):  
Antonio Urquízar-Herrera

Chapter 3 approaches the notion of trophy through historical accounts of the Christianization of the Córdoba and Seville Islamic temples in the thirteenth-century and the late-fifteenth-century conquest of Granada. The first two examples on Córdoba and Seville are relevant to explore the way in which medieval chronicles (mainly Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and his entourage) turned the narrative of the Christianization of mosques into one of the central topics of the restoration myth. The sixteenth-century narratives about the taking of the Alhambra in Granada explain the continuity of this triumphal reading within the humanist model of chorography and urban eulogy (Lucius Marineus Siculus, Luis de Mármol Carvajal, and Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza).


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Gwynne Mapes ◽  
Andrew S. Ross

Abstract In this article we consider the discursive production of status as it relates to democratic ideals of environmental equity and community responsibility, orienting specifically to food discourse and ‘elite authenticity’ (Mapes 2018), as well as to recent work concerning normativity and class inequality (e.g. Thurlow 2016; Hall, Levon, & Milani 2019). Utilizing a dataset comprised of 150 Instagram posts, drawn from three different acclaimed chefs’ personal accounts, we examine the ways in which these celebrities emphasize local/sustainable food practices while simultaneously asserting their claims to privileged eating. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we document three general discursive tactics: (i) plant-based emphasis, (ii) local/community terroir, and (iii) realities of meat consumption. Ultimately, we establish how the chefs’ claims to egalitarian/environmental ideals paradoxically diminish their eliteness, while simultaneously elevating their social prestige, pointing to the often complicated and covert ways in which class inequality permeates the social landscape of contemporary eating. (Food discourse, elite authenticity, normativity, social class, locality/sustainability)*


1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.


1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-606
Author(s):  
John Villiers

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.


1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Mignolo

When George Balandier proposed his theoretical approach to a colonial situation, the colonization of language was not an issue that piqued the interest of scholars in history, sociology, economics, or anthropology, which were the primary disciplines targeted in his article. When some fifteen years later Michel Foucault underlined the social and historical significance of language (‘l'énoncé*’) and discursive formation, the colonization of language was still not an issue to those attentive to the archaeology of knowledge. Such an archaeology, founded on the paradigmatic example generally understood as the Western tradition, overlooked the case history in which an archaeology of discursive formation would have led to the very root of the massive colonization of language which began in the sixteenth century with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires.


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