‘HOW HARD AN ENTERPRISE IT IS’: AUTHORIAL SELF-FASHIONING IN JOHN DOWLAND’S PRINTED BOOKS

2007 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 43-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Gibson

The naming of John Dowland as ‘Author’ on the title page of his publication The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597) suggests a proprietary relationship between the composer and his work. This proprietary relationship is, perhaps, reinforced with the alignment of Dowland’s intellectual activities as ‘author’ with the notions of ‘composition’ and ‘invention’ in the same passage. All three terms could be used by the late sixteenth century to refer to notions of creativity, individual intellectual labour or origination. While many early examples of the use of ‘author’ refer specifically to God or Christ as creator, such as Chaucer’s declaration that ‘The auctour of matrimonye is Christ’, by the sixteenth century it was increasingly used to refer to an individual originator of intellectual or artistic creation closer to the modern sense of the word. Its sixteenth-century usage is, for instance, reflected in the title ‘A tretys, excerpte of diverse labores of auctores’, or as in a reference in 1509 to ‘The noble actor plinius’. Likewise, ‘invent’ or ‘inventor’ could be used to refer to the process of individual intellectual creation, exemplified by its use in 1576 ‘Your brain or your wit, and your pen, the one to invent and devise, the other to write’, while ‘compose’ could mean to make, to compose in words, ‘to write as author’ or, more specifically, to write music.

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.


Author(s):  
Lucia Lichnerová

The study To Publish, Make Known and Sell is based on verified existence of competition tensions between the 15th century typographers/publishers, related to the absence of functional regulatory tools of book production of the incunabula period. The increase in the number of book-printers within the relatively narrow geographical area, disregard of publishers’ privileges, the emergence of pirated reprints, as well as insufficient self-promotion on the book market through introducing novelties had concentrated typographers’ attention on devising new tools of securing their triumph in publisher’s competition – the so called book advertisements. The author has analysed 44 promotional posters of the incunabula period from several points of view and attempted to identify their design elements, which on the one hand showed signs of certain standardization, while on the other hand they were subject to personal creativity of their creator. She gives detailed overview of the circumstances of the origin, typographic design and contents of book advertisements of several kinds within the context of promoting either the existing or planned editions, of one edition or a group of books; specifically focusing on the unique types of advertising. In conclusion, the author cites the circumstances of the extinction of book advertisements related to the rise of the new promotional tool – booksellers’ catalogue and submits a bibliography of the book advertisements dating from the 15th century.


2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


Author(s):  
Ted Nannicelli

This chapter summarizes the book’s central claims and looks at paths for future work on the applied ethics of artistic creation and ethical criticism. It suggests the need for two parallel strands of inquiry: On the one hand, as the term “applied ethics” suggests, there is a need for a finer-grained understanding of both the artistic and ethical contexts of artistic creation—an understanding that will need to be informed by research across a number of fields, including anthropology, art history, and moral psychology. On the other hand, whatever details of that context are revealed by this fine-grained analysis, there will be a more abstract conceptual challenge about how to reconcile the norms of that art-historical and ethical context with those in currency in the art-historical and ethical context from which one is judging the work. So, the parallel path of inquiry is in metaethics.


1893 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 127-292
Author(s):  
I. S. Leadam

In the ‘English Historical Review’ for April (1893) Professor Ashley offers some criticisms upon the ‘Introduction to the Inquisition of 1517,’ contributed by me to the ‘Transactions of the Royal Historical Society’ for 1892. One object of that Introduction, it may be remembered, was to disprove the assertion of Professor Ashley that at the time when the evictions for inclosure began, and until ‘towards the end of the period,’ ‘the mass of copyholders’ had no legal security. In my view, the manorial records, the compilations of laws in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the practice of the courts, even the treatises of the jurists when critically scrutinised, led to the conclusion not merely that copyholders enjoyed protection in legal theory, but that their predecessors in title, the villeins, had done so before them. I drew no distinction in this matter between customary tenants and copyholders, as Professor Ashley appears to suppose, but showed that security extended even to villeins by blood, or ‘nativi,’ on custo-mary lands. Professor Ashley's proposition that ‘customary tenants’ and ‘copyholders’ were equivalent terms was never doubted by me, and is irrelevant to my argument. Indeed, it is assumed by me on the very pages to which he refers. ‘Mr. Leadam,’ he says, ‘draws a sharp distinction between “copyholders” on the one side and “tenants at will” on the other—a distinction which one may doubt whether the men of the sixteenth century would have felt so keenly.’ The distinction, as those who turn to the passage will see, is between ‘copyholders,’ used in Fitzherbert's sense as equivalent to customary tenants, who were ‘tenants at will according to the custom of the manor,’ and ‘tenants at will at Common Law.’


2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-322
Author(s):  
Henrik Lagerlund ◽  

In this article, I present two virtually unknown sixteenth-century views of human freedom, that is, the views of Bartolomaeus de Usingen (1465–1532) and Jodocus Trutfetter (1460–1519) on the one hand and John Mair (1470–1550) on the other. Their views serve as a natural context and partial background to the more famous debate on human freedom between Martin Luther (1483–1556) and Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) from 1524–1526. Usingen and Trutfetter were Luther’s philosophy teachers in Erfurt. In a passage from Book III of John Mair’s commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics from 1530, he seems to defend a view of human freedom by which we can will evil for the sake of evil. Very few thinkers in the history of philosophy have defended such a view. The most famous medieval thinker to do so is William Ockham (1288–1347). To illustrate how radical this view is, I place him in the historical context of such thinkers as Plato, Augustine, Buridan, and Descartes.


1997 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Brenda Dunn-Lardeau

In 1534 Pierre de Sainte Lucie published Jehan Du Pré's Le Palais des Nobles Dames in which the treatment of the theme of prodigious births and death in childbirth is of particular interest compared to that of his sixteenth century contemporaries. On the one hand, the author's religious faith enables him to adopt a sympathetic attitude toward certain aspects of pregnancy such as unusual variations in gestation length. On the other hand, the same faith limits Du Pré's critical powers since it prevents him from distinguishing legend from reality. His conception of motherhood is confined to the biological level. Finally, the woodcuts represent midwives still playing a major role in obstetrics in contrast with their growing marginalization by surgeons in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.


Author(s):  
Joan Mahiques Climent

Resum: El ms. 4504 de Bibliothèque Mazarine de París aplega, per una banda, cinc exemplars impresos de la “Peregrinació del Venturós Pelegrí” ab les “Cobles de la Mort” i, per altra banda, una còpia manuscrita parcial del Venturós Pelegrí amb una traducció francesa incompleta a cura de Josep Tastu (1787-1849), que s’encarregà de compilar tots els materials del volum. A banda de presentar el contingut general del ms. 4504, descrivim amb detall cada una de les cinc edicions, posant especial èmfasi en la més antiga, probablement datada de mitjan segle XVI o poc després. Pel fet d’ésser el testimoni més antic que coneixem del Venturós Pelegrí, aquest exemplar acèfal i àpode, estampat a línia seguida amb tres gravats encara visibles, aporta dades rellevants per al coneixement de les vies de difusió d’aquesta obra als segles XVI-XVII. Paraules clau: Edad Moderna, Poesia catalana, Impremta, Xilografia, Josep Tastu.  Abstract: The Ms. 4504 of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris contains, on the one hand, five printed copies of the “Peregrinació del Venturós Pelegrí” ab les “Cobles de la Mort” and, on the other hand, a partial hand-written copy of the Venturós Pelegrí with an incomplete French translation by Josep Tastu (1787-1849), who compiled all the materials of this volume. Apart from presenting the general content of the ms. 4504, we describe in detail the five editions with particular emphasis on the oldest one, probably dating from the mid-sixteenth century or shortly thereafter. This printed book, now acephalous and apodous, in which the lines go all the way across the page, still preserves three woodcuts. As the earliest witness we know of the Venturós Pelegrí, this printed copy provides some evidences to understand the dissemination of this work during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Keywords: Modern Age, Catalan poetry, Printing, Woodcut, Josep Tastu.


X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Belardi ◽  
Luca Martini ◽  
Valeria Menchetelli

The Rocca Paolina of Perugia. From a fortress of inaccessibility to a landmark of accessibilityBuilt in the Perugia acropolis in the mid-sixteenth century as a physical expression of the oppressive reprisal of Pope Paul III against the city’s seigniory of the Baglioni family, the Rocca Paolina has always been hated by the Perugia people who, on several occasions during the nineteenth century, did not hesitate to demolish it. The historical events of this fortified architecture are ambiguously linked with its iconographic value, oscillating around a balance in continuous evolution that sees it on the one hand as a fortress of inaccessibility and on the other hand as a flywheel of accessibility.


Author(s):  
Andy Kesson

This chapter rereads the generic boundaries of Shakespeare’s writing by exploring two different, and potentially opposed, meanings of the word ‘comedy’ in the sixteenth century. On the one hand, comedy was a recognizable classical concept, representing a range of generic possibilities with implications for tone, prosody, character range and narrative expectation. On the other hand, comedy had also become a vernacular English word which might mean little more than play or story, with no implication about content or style. This chapter suggests that Shakespeare was much more active than previously recognized in creating a dramatic genre built around self-consciously classical principles. The subsequent canonization of Shakespeare’s idiosyncratic take on the genre has in turn inflected the way the much more fluid work of his contemporaries has been read and understood. This chapter explores the multiple meanings of comedy in this early period alongside Shakespeare’s active intervention within it.


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