‘MUCH TO DELIVER IN YOUR HONOUR'S EAR’: ANGELO NOTARI’S WORK IN INTELLIGENCE, 1616–1623

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 219-252
Author(s):  
Alana Mailes
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
International Trial ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Political Networks ◽  
Musical Networks

It has long been surmised that the Paduan singer, lutenist and composer Angelo Notari (1566–1663) was employed as a spy after immigrating to England circa 1610. In examining Venetian counterintelligence papers previously neglected by musicologists, I here confirm that Notari was indeed an intelligencer. More specifically, he was a paid informant for the Venetian State Inquisitors between 1616 and 1619 and participated in a contentious international trial concerning the Venetian ambassador to England, Antonio Foscarini. I argue that Notari's work as a musician was inextricable from his identity as an intelligencer and former Venetian citizen and demonstrate that Italian musicians in Jacobean London significantly influenced international diplomatic relations. By identifying intersections between the two highly social practices of music-making and intelligence-gathering, I encourage greater musicological attention to political networks that transmitted music across borders and, conversely, musical networks that transmitted political intelligence. I thus situate seventeenth-century musical transculturation within its broader diplomatic, confessional and economic contexts.

Knowledge and experience in the ‘disguised duke’ play

2020 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Eric Leonidas
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Political Control ◽  
The Social ◽  
Textual Traditions ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Seventeenth-century English dramatists produced several ‘disguised duke’ plays in which a ruler disguises himself to reinforce political control. Critics typically view these as a call for monarchs to address corruption at court. But such readers have largely ignored the epistemological shift represented: knowledge is based on circulation among, observation of, and dialogue with citizens rather than on textual traditions. Together, the plays legitimise the knowledge and experience of observers immersed in London’s daily life, playwrights included. Moreover, the disguised ruler motif also contributed to the social practices through which ‘new’ empirical forms of knowledge gained authority.

The Ups and Downs of Louis Grabu

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 1-64
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Walkling
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
English Music ◽  
Music Making ◽  
History Of ◽  
Periodic Fluctuations ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Ultimate Fate ◽  
Considerable Detail

This article explores the career of Louis Grabu, Master of the Music to Charles II of England and an important but often overlooked and unnecessarily denigrated figure in the history of English music and music-making during the last third of the seventeenth century. While both his origins and his ultimate fate remain obscure, Grabu's activities between 1665 and 1694 are sufficiently documented to enable us not only to trace in considerable detail the periodic fluctuations in his fortunes, but also to establish a paradigm for exploring the lives of the vast number of seventeenth-century court musicians whose personal details must be gleaned from a mix of administrative records, surviving musical compositions and occasional observations recorded in contemporary diaries and correspondence. When these sources are carefully and exhaustively mined, a picture begins to emerge that belies the often glib dismissal of the musician's activities and abilities by contemporaries and modern scholars alike.

Musician and Poet

2021 ◽  
pp. 263-282
Author(s):  
Christine Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Leisure Activity ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Giambattista Marino ◽  
Rough Draft ◽  
Music Books ◽  
The Times

Music-making was a popular leisure activity in aristocratic households in the early seventeenth century and a growing number of courtier poets wrote and exchanged verse in aristocratic salons and literary coteries. Chapter 12 continues the exploration of Herbert’s intellectual achievements and reputation as a polymath. It traces his interest in playing the lute and singing, and the musical preferences and fashions demonstrated by the music books he owned and the preludes, fantasias, pavanes, galliards, courantes, voltes, sarabands, and airs assembled in his unique manuscript lute book. It probes his inclusion among the metaphysical poets, exploring the influence of John Donne and Giambattista Marino, but also that of Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, and Sir Philip Sidney, and of Horace, Juvenal, and Ovid. It uses the themes of love, beauty, immortality, and death to examine examples of his sonnets, elegies, epitaphs, satires, and lyrical poems, some of which were published posthumously as The Occasional Verses of Lord Herbert of Cherbury in 1665, and looks briefly at his Latin philosophical poems and his rough draft for a masque. It explores his preference for deploying verbal ingenuity and erudition rather than feelings, his deployment of metaphysical conceits and concepts, his innovative experimentation with rhyme and the extent of his participation in the literary coterie culture of the times. It claims a place for him among the leading minor poets and suggests that this was an impressive achievement for a man heavily engaged in other intellectual fields as well as political and estate matters.

Intersections Between the Architect’s Cubit, the Science of Surveying, and Social Practices in CaʿFer Efendi’s Seventeenth-Century Book on Ottoman Architecture

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-177
Author(s):  
Gül Kale
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Ottoman Architecture ◽  
Scientific Context ◽  
Mathematical Sciences ◽  
Architect’S Cubit ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract In 1614 Caʿfer Efendi devoted four chapters of his book on architecture to the science of surveying. Caʿfer’s text is the only extant comprehensive book written by a scholar on the relation between architecture and various forms of knowledge. His sections on surveying have attracted little scholarly attention since they were often viewed as ad hoc chapters in a biography of the chief architect Mehmed Agha. An investigation into the intersection between architecture, as represented by the architect’s cubit, the science of surveying, and jurisprudence sheds significant light on how scholars assessed the legitimacy of early modern Ottoman architecture. In this article, I examine the relationship between architectural practices, mathematical knowledge, and social practices by focusing on Caʿfer Efendi’s elaborations on the architect’s cubit, units of measure, and mensuration of areas. These links need to be understood through the cultural and scientific context in which architects and scholars collaborated. I also explore Caʿfer Efendi’s identity, which gave him the tools to discuss such intrinsic connections. When read along with court decrees, and in conjunction with the use of mathematical sciences for civic affairs, this investigation reveals how Ottoman architecture was embedded in the scientific discourses, social practices, and ethical concerns of the early seventeenth century.

Dynasty and State Building in the Spanish Habsburg Monarchy: The Career of Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy (1588-1624)

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-292
Author(s):  
Liesbeth Geevers
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
State Building ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Composite State

The Spanish Habsburg Monarchy was a composite state that needed several individuals of royal blood other than the ruler to govern its constituent parts. Since the dynasty was one of few central institutions, the participation of relatives in rule can be seen as part of state building at an imperial level. This essay analyzes the increasing involvement of relatives and thus the “patrimonialization” of dynastic rule in the seventeenth century. We focus on the career of Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy (1588-1624), nephew of Philip iii. His career shows first, how and why the Spanish monarchy went through a phase of increased involvement of royal relatives during his lifetime; and second, how the employment of nephews (and thus the functioning of the Habsburg composite state) took shape in the fraught context of dynastic interests, honor and diplomatic relations with the paternal families of the nephews.

scholarly journals Co-opting the Rival Ca(n)non the Turkish Episode of Hikayat Hang Tuah

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-260
Author(s):  
Vladimir Braginsky ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Ottoman Turkey

Among specimens of traditional Malay literary polemics, or rather, “wars of books”, we find an interesting group of texts of the mid or late seventeenth century, which narrate how an Acehnese embassy was dispatched to Ottoman Turkey to obtain “large cannons”. Remarkably, alongside literary pieces composed in Aceh, this group also includes the Turkish episode of Hikayat Hang Tuah ( HHT ), the epic created in Johor which describes the epoch of the Malaccan sultanate. However, HHT is a double-layered work in which Malacca not infrequently stands for Johor, whose relations with Aceh were more often than not hostile. HHT ’s author covertly polemicizes against Acehnese literary works, striving to prove that Malacca (read Johor) allegedly established diplomatic relations with the Ottomans earlier than Aceh. HHT also attempts to show that its mission to Istanbul was much more successful than Aceh’s and that it completed the recognition of Malacca/Johor across the entire political space from China to Turkey. Yet, the political and literary agendas of HHT ’s author differ radically. In the former, the forces of repulsion hold sway, which leads HHT to depict the triumph of Johor in its rivalry with Aceh. In the latter, on the contrary, the forces of attraction dominate. For this reason the Turkish episode in HHT borrows the plot of Acehnese works, constructs its portrayals of Istanbul from a mosaic of Acehnese sources, and resorts to the grand Acehnese literary style of the “gold-and-jewel” variety. Keywords: traditional Malay literature, Hikayat Hang Tuah , Malacca, Johor, Aceh, Turkey, Istanbul, the Ottomans, Acehnese embassy, political agenda, palimpsest, war of books, gold-and-jewel style

Truth and the Experiential

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The chapter examines the fundamental transformations to ways of knowing the natural world effected by black ritual practitioners in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. During this pivotal period, black Mohanes led an epistemological revolution in which the experiential replaced first principles as the basis for Caribbean ways of knowing truths about the natural world. Experientially based forms of producing and consuming medical knowledge proved essential to the creation of Atlantic nodes of knowledge production in spaces like Cartagena. Black Caribbean epistemological spaces in which the experiential overcame old dogma, even if experientially-based, were conspicuously located outside the boundaries that natural philosophers defined.In the early modern Caribbean a heterogeneous group of ritual practitioners of African descent arriving from Europe, Africa, and the New World experimented with new materials they found in the Americas and formulated material, conceptual, and social practices based on Caribbean experiential findings that they designed to interpret and establish authority over a natural world that encompassed the moral and the spiritual. As the chapter shows here, black ritual practitioners’ ways of knowing the natural world and bodies were intrinsically related to the development of novel Caribbean experientially based ways of articulating the nature of truth.

Members of the Family of a Diplomatic Agent

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denza Eileen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Normal Form ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Vienna Convention ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
The Family

This chapter examines Article 37.1 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations which addresses the family members of a diplomatic agent. The Article states that the members of the family of a diplomatic agent forming part of his household shall, if they are not nationals of the receiving State, enjoy the privileges and immunities specified in Articles 29 to 36. This practice traces its roots back to the second half of the seventeenth century when permanent missions gradually replaced special missions as the normal form of representation, and diplomats would spend several years in a post. Diplomats would then to bring with him his immediate family as well as a retinue of servants to minister to his comforts and enhance his prestige. The rationale for extending privileges and immunities to the immediate families of diplomatic agents has remained largely unchallenged under the Convention regime as it is still followed today.

The Sound of Profession Ceremonies in Novohispanic Convents

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-170
Author(s):  
CESAR D. FAVILA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Main Subject ◽  
Valuable Source ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Artistic Patronage

AbstractNuns in New Spain were celebrated with music and elaborate rituals when they took the habit and professed in a convent. These grandiose profession ceremonies drew in a host of urban citizens to the convent churches. Indeed, “more girls are smitten by the ceremony, than anything else,” remarked Fanny Calderón, wife of a Spanish ambassador who lived in Mexico City in the early 1840s, confirming that the iconic festivity endured well into the nineteenth century after Mexico's independence.This article on nuns’ professions is framed within the Order of the Immaculate Conception (Conceptionists). One of the largest extant collections of Novohispanic convent music comes from the Conceptionist community of the Santísima Trinidad, founded in seventeenth-century Puebla. The manuscripts are preserved at Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical “Carlos Chávez” in Mexico City, and they contain profession villancicos. My research on Conceptionist ritual books and biographies of noteworthy nuns allows me to place the villancicos within the wider context of Conceptionist devotion, convent race relations, and artistic patronage. The texts for the villancicos present women as the main subject of the compositions, which adorned a spectacular ritual also centered on women. The profession ceremony is, therefore, a valuable source to begin understanding Novohispanic women's contribution to music making.

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