The Hazards of Conversion: Nuns, Jews, and Demons in Late Renaissance Italy

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamar Herzig
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Demonic Possession ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
Ruling Elites ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Female Monasticism ◽  
Late Renaissance

Female monasticism and the conversion of the Jews were both major concerns for the ecclesiastical establishment, as well as for Italian ruling elites, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Hence, the monachization of baptized Jewish girls acquired a unique symbolic significance. Moreover, during this period cases of demonic possession were on the rise, and so were witchcraft accusations. This article explores a case from late sixteenth-century Mantua in which Jewish conversion, female monachization, demonic possession and witch-hunting all came into play in a violent drama. Drawing on unpublished documents as well as on chronicles and hagiographies, the article elucidates the mental toll that conversion and monachization took on the Jewess Luina, who later became known as Sister Margherita. It delineates her life, which culminated with her diagnosis as a demoniac, and analyzes the significance that this etiology held for the energumen—whose affliction was attributed to her ongoing contacts with Jews—and for Mantua's Jews. The article argues that the anxiety provoked by suspicions that a formerly Jewish nun reverted to Judaism was so profound, that it led to the burning at the stake of Judith Franchetta, the only Jew ever to be executed as a witch in the Italian peninsula.

Abortion and the Confessional in Counter-Reformation Italy

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Christopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Ecclesiastical Administration ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Late Renaissance

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.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.

The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Renaissance Italy

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
The One

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.

Artisans, Objects and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Hohti Erichsen
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Luxury Goods ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Household Economies ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cultural Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
History Books

Did ordinary Italians have a ‘Renaissance’? This book presents the first in-depth exploration of how artisans and small local traders experienced the material and cultural Renaissance. Drawing on a rich blend of sixteenth-century visual and archival evidence, it examines how individuals and families at artisanal levels (such as shoemakers, barbers, bakers and innkeepers) lived and worked, managed their household economies and consumption, socialised in their homes, and engaged with the arts and the markets for luxury goods. It demonstrates that although the economic and social status of local craftsmen and traders was relatively low, their material possessions show how these men and women who rarely make it into the history books were fully engaged with contemporary culture, cultural customs and the urban way of life.

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
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Professional Association ◽  
Guild Structure ◽  
Hierarchical Order ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
The Social ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Renaissance Artist

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.

The Tragic, the Comic and the Tragicomic in Cretan Renaissance Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Holton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Biblical Drama ◽  
Hybrid Genre ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
Plot Structure ◽  
Folk Tradition ◽  
Renaissance Poetics

Greek tragedy and comedy re-emerge in late sixteenth-century Crete, now based on Renaissance neo-classical prescriptions. Besides ‘pure’ examples of the genres we also find a tragedia di lieto fine (the biblical drama Abraham’s Sacrifice) and a pastoral idyll with a tragic outcome (The Shepherdess), while Kornaros’ verse romance Erotokritos plays with the possibility of a tragic ending before settling for the outcome proper to romance. This intermingling of the tragic and the comic – of tears and laughter – is common in Cretan Renaissance literature, and most fully realised in the new hybrid genre of tragicommedia pastorale, which seems to have been popular in Crete around 1600. Taking Panoria by Georgios Chortatsis as its main textual focus, this chapter explores the interaction of tears and laughter both at a textual level and in plot structure. While the theoretical bases of tragicomedy, as propounded by Guarini, clearly underpin works like Panoria, in the case of works belonging to other genres other factors are involved: Petrarchising tropes, which are common in Cretan literature, and the antithetical structures characteristic of the folk tradition. Panoria, set on Mount Ida, is thoroughly Cretan and at the same time thoroughly imbued with late-Renaissance poetics.

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