Recusants and the Rosary: A Seventeenth-Century Chapel in Aberdeen

2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218
Author(s):  
Fern Insh
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Reformation

Provost Skene’s House, Aberdeen, is home to a painted ceiling depicting scenes from the lives of both Christ and the Virgin. This decoration has intrigued scholars and visitors alike for around sixty years since it was renovated and unveiled to the public in the early 1950s. The ceiling, painted in the seventeenth century, has suffered a considerable amount of damage. Unfortunately, half of the original decorative scheme has been lost. In addition to this, panels that do survive have been modified slightly during restoration. This article examines some of the early-modern continental prints used as sources by the original painters in order to determine that they were Scottish, and not travelling artists from the Low Countries. It also reconstructs the majority of the historic layout of the ceiling, by examining pre-restoration photographs of lost details in conjunction with further early-modern print sources. The article will attempt to identify some of the images which have been lost from the ceiling and argue that the original cycle of images depicted The Mysteries of the Rosary. It will also examine how the painted ceiling, created in the aftermath of the Reformation, survived both the effects of anti-Catholic legislation in Scotland and time. Finally, the relationships between the patron and his local recusant community are discussed in conjunction with the significance of the deliberate inclusion of the IHS monogram within the ceiling’s design.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Ceri Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
History Plays ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private Prayer

Fiction is good at registering how speakers approach God in ways that are specific to their time and place. Literary critics have studied the dramatic qualities in the public prayer of the early modern liturgy; religious historians have taken a lead from lyric poetry when discussing the language of private prayer. This chapter crosses these lines of research to show how private prayer at the turn of the seventeenth century is explicitly dramatic. Shakespeare scholars focus on his plays’ oaths, prophecies, and curses. Yet private prayers in the folio versions of the history plays go beyond these genres, to structure the action on stage. They are, moreover, greater in number and substance than in the quarto versions, and are original, rather than being sourced from the liturgy, Bible, or chronicles.

Meeting Lydgate’s Ghost: Building Medieval History in Seventeenth-Century England

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (299) ◽  
pp. 251-271
Author(s):  
Mimi Ensley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
British Library ◽  
John Lydgate ◽  
Medieval Romance ◽  
English History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Historical Resources

Abstract This article examines a manuscript poem composed by the seventeenth-century author John Lane. Writing in what is now London, British Library, Harley MS 5243, Lane revives the medieval poet John Lydgate in order to re-tell the story of Guy of Warwick, famous from medieval romance. In Lane’s poem, Lydgate returns from beyond the grave to proclaim the historicity of Guy’s legend and simultaneously preserve his own reputation as a chronicler of English history. While some scholars suggest that Lydgate’s popularity declined in the post-Reformation period due to his reputation as the ‘Monk of Bury’, and while it is true that significantly fewer editions of Lydgate’s poems were published in the decades after the Reformation, Lane’s poem offers another window into Lydgate’s early modern reputation. I argue that Lane’s historiographic technique in his Guy of Warwick narrative mirrors Lydgate’s own poetic histories. Both Lane and Lydgate grapple with existing historical resources and compose their narratives by compiling the accreted traditions of the past, supplementing these traditions with documentary sources and artefacts. This article, thus, complicates existing scholarly narratives that align Lydgate with medieval or monastic traditions, traditions perceived to be irrecoverably transformed by the events of the Reformation in England.

“Constructing the Poor in Early Seventeenth-Century London”1

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-463
Author(s):  
Claire S. Schen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Demographic Pressure ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Undeserving Poor

Historians of early modern Europe have become accustomed to the dichotomy of the deserving and undeserving poor, though they still debate the origins of the transformation of attitudes toward the poor and poverty. Historians have studied less carefully the ways in which these presumably static categories flexed, as individuals and officials worked out poor relief and charity on the local level. Military, religious, and social exigencies, precipitated by war, the Reformation, and demographic pressure, allowed churchwardens and vestrymen to redraw the contours of the deserving and undeserving poor within the broader frame of the infirm, aged, and sick. International conflicts of the early seventeenth century created circumstances and refugees not anticipated by the poor law innovators of the sixteenth century. London’s responses to these unexpected developments illustrate how inhabitants constructed the categories of die deserving and undeserving poor. This construction depended upon the discretion of churchwardens and their fellow officers, who listened to the accounts and read the official documents of the poor making claims on parish relief and charity.

Henry Care, Roger L’ Estrange and the Contested Memory of Erasmus and the Reformation in Restoration England

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Gregory D. Dodds
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
The Public ◽  
William Penn ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
English Society ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract Henry Care and Roger L’ Estrange fought a bitter battle in the public press in Restoration England. Exploring the ways in which each employed the writings and reputation of Desiderius Erasmus provides insight into the deep fault lines dividing English society in the decade from 1678 to 1688. Their divergent uses of Erasmus demonstrate how late-seventeenth-century interpretations of the early sixteenth-century Reformation became critical points of conflict in the most significant political and religious debates of the period. Paying attention to the reception of Erasmus also helps explain how these two bitter enemies eventually joined William Penn in supporting James II’s Indulgence for Liberty of Conscience.

Episcopal Tombs in Early Modern England

2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SHERLOCK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.

Democracy and Civil Society in the Early Modern Period: The Rise of Three Types of Civil Societies in the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-81
Author(s):  
Maarten F. Van Dijck
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Craft Guilds ◽  
Civil Societies

This article proposes to refine the concept civil society by discerning three distinct forms of civil society in the past. This refined conceptual framework counters the criticism that civil society suffers from its growing popularity and its broad definition. The usefulness of these three forms of civil society—which are based on the later work of Jürgen Habermas—are applied in this article on the seventeenth-century Low Countries. The central question is how these forms of civil society acted as schools of democracy in the seventeenth-century Spanish Netherlands and Dutch Republic. The three types of civil society are identified that developed through time and built a cumulative tradition of civil society. These are the medieval craft guilds (liberal civil society), the early modern civic militia (republican civil society), and the modern Enlightenment sociability (deliberative civil society). Data about the associational life in two cities in the Low Countries, Mechelen and Rotterdam, show that different forms of civil societies had different functions according to the societal context. Furthermore, the data show that societies with civil societies characterized by social inclusive boards and high mutation ratios had less political impact when they lacked links with existing political institutions. This implies that civil societies did not as a rule serve as schools of democracy.

Unity and Diversity as a Theme in Early Modern Dutch Religious History: an Interpretation

1996 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 221-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joke Spaans
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Church Historians

The Reformation in the Low Countries fascinates both church historians and general historians. Religious change and political revolution went hand in hand. The history of the Reformation is an integral part of the history of the birth of the Dutch nation. Although well-researched, its attraction is renewed with each successive historiographical fashion.

Leonardo's Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Kemp ◽  
Robert B. Simon ◽  
Margaret Dalivalle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Auction House ◽  
The Public ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
Media Spectacle ◽  
Art Dealers ◽  
Public Imagination

In Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts the ‘Three Salvateers’—Robert Simon, Martin Kemp and Margaret Dalivalle—give a first-hand account of the discovery of the lost Renaissance masterpiece; from its purchase for $1,175 in a New Orleans auction house in 2005, to the worldwide media spectacle of its sale to a Saudi prince for $450 million in 2017. A behind-the-scenes view of the painstaking processes of identification, consultation, scientific analysis, conservation, and archival research that underpinned the attribution of the painting to Leonardo, the book presents a consideration of the place of the painting in Leonardo’s body of work. Exploring the meaning of the painting in terms of Renaissance theology, it considers the identity of its original patron or intended recipient. Unravelling networks of early modern art dealers and collectors in Europe, it traces the emerging reception of Leonardo during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was in Enlightenment Britain that the idea of Leonardo as artist–scientist took hold of the public imagination. This book examines the ‘invention’ of Leonardo through the unique prism of the Stuart courts. The documented presence of three paintings of Christ attributed to Leonardo in the vicinity of the seventeenth-century British Royal Collection is both extraordinary and perplexing. Today, Leonardo’s five-hundred-year-old Salvator has not yet disclosed its secret history.

Lord Deputy Chichester and the English Government’s ‘Mandates Policy’ in Ireland, 1605–1607

1991 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCavitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Protestant Clergy ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

One of the liveliest debates in recent early modern Irish historiography has concerned the ‘failure’ of the Reformation in Ireland and when this occurred. Originally Professor Canny took issue with Dr. Brendan Bradshaw on this topic. Canny rejected Bradshaw’s thesis that the Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that counter-reformation catholicism only triumphed in the nineteenth century. Other contributions were then made to the debate by Dr. Alan Ford and later Karl Bottigheimer. Ford considered the 1590–1641 period as crucial, while Bottigheimer favoured the early seventeenth century as the key era. In the light of the work of Ford and Bottigheimer, Canny reconsidered the issue in an article published in 1986. He rejected what he believed to be Ford’s overly-pessimistic assessment that the Church of Ireland clergy soon despaired of the Reformation’s success in the seventeenth century. Instead, it is contended, Protestant clergy and laymen alike were optimistic that penal prosecution might still pave the way for considerable advances at this time. Moreover, Canny further argued that Ford was ‘mistaken in treating the clergy as an autonomous group and mistaken also in allowing excessive influence to ideology as the determinant of policy’.

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