VII. Ightham Mote: Politics and Architecture in Early Tudor England

Archaeologia ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 153-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Starkey

Ightham Mote in Kent is one of the most beautiful of English country houses; it is also one of the most important. It stands at the foot of a steep hill, four-square and surrounded by the moat that gives it its name. Directly from the water rises the picturesquely irregular exterior. Most of the lower courses and the whole west or gatehouse front are of Kentish ragstone; much of the upper storey, however, is half-timbered. This mixture reveals the chief fact in the history of the house. It is a late medieval building, extensively remodelled in the early sixteenth century (pl. LII).The works were carried out by Sir Richard Clement, a minor Tudor courtier (pl. LIII a), and they embody his political and social ambitions with remarkable faithfulness. At the same time, the clarity of Clement's statement reflects back on his own society and raises important questions about the nature of both early Tudor art and politics and the relationship between them. I begin by tracing Clement's career to the time of his purchase of Ightham Mote; then the rebuilding of the house is described and its decorations placed within the context of the early Tudor court style; finally, the possible political significance of the style is explored, partly in terms of its origins and partly through an account of Clement's later career as a Kentish gentleman.

Author(s):  
Peter Linehan

This book springs from its author’s continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal—on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatization of the Church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, use is made of the also unpublished so-called ‘secret’ registers of the popes of the period. The issues it raises concern not only Spanish and Portuguese society in general but also the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe, as well as of the activity in that period of those caterpillars of the commonwealth, the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to advance the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law, Alfonso XI, as God’s vicegerent in his.


1956 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 145-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Catherine Dunn

“The whole history of the ‘epistle,’ as a literary genre, is full of interest and invites investigation.” — W. Rhys Roberts.One of Professor Morris Croll's earliest essays on prose style was an article on Justus Lipsius, the sixteenth-century Belgian scholar and rhetorician whose name has become identified with the “anti-Ciceronian” school of prose. Croll later studied him as the leader of a triumvirate (Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon), and thus clarified somewhat the relationship of English prose style to continental experiments. The indebtedness of certain English writers, like John Hoskyns and Ben Jonson, to the epistolary theory of Lipsius is now well known, but the precise role played by his Epistolica institutio in literary history has never been clearly presented. Because Professor Croll's interests were centered in prose rhythm, he analyzed the Institutio only for the light it shed upon the development of “Attic” prose structure in the Renaissance.


Paragraph ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-142
Author(s):  
James Helgeson

The terms ‘self’ and ‘moi’ appeared within the lexica of French and English at the end of the sixteenth century, for example in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. This paper takes a sceptical approach to lexical arguments about the history of the self and SELF-concepts. Initially, the relationship of SELF to the question of ‘paradigms’ and ‘conceptual schemes’ is discussed via recent work in developmental psychology (Susan Carey) and classic discussions within analytic philosophy (Donald Davidson). The questions raised in the theoretical discussion are then re-examined through short readings of texts that do not contain lexicalized SELF-vocabulary, by the sixteenth-century French writers Maurice Scève and Michel de Montaigne. It is suggested that the importance of lexical arguments to the history of selves and SELF-concepts has been exaggerated, and that cognitive study has the potential to transform the study of the first-person stance and its history.


Traditio ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 493-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myron P. Gilmore

During the last decade the works of Professor Guido Kisch have made an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the legal thought of the sixteenth century, particularly to the school represented by the University of Basel. His articles and monographs have dealt with the biographical and literary history of significant scholars as well as with the rival schools of interpretation represented by ‘mos italicus' and ‘mos gallicus.' Building on these earlier studies, Professor Kisch has now produced a major work of more comprehensive scope, which goes beyond biographical and methodological questions to the analysis of significant change in substantive legal doctrines. Convinced that the age of humanism and the reception of Roman law saw the formation of some of the most important modern legal concepts, he centers his research on the evolution of the theory of equity with due attention, on the one hand, to the relationship between sixteenth-century innovation and the historic western tradition and, on the other, to the interaction between the academic profession and the practicing lawyers.


Author(s):  
James Kearney

This essay examines the role that the specter of idleness played in the ongoing transformation of labor in England during the late medieval and early modern periods. It begins by tracing an historical shift in Christian conceptions of labor through a knotty genealogy of ideas about labor and idleness that extends from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The essay then turns to an early sixteenth-century text that is not often considered in either medieval or early modern histories of Christian thought about labor: Thomas More’sUtopia(1516). The essay contends thatUtopiais fundamentally shaped by More’s meditation on labor and idleness and that that meditation opens the utopian text out toward a vexed history of ideas concerning human work that extends forward from the fourteenth century. With its idiosyncratic but historically resonant meditation on human labor, More’sUtopiarepresents a particularly useful vantage point from which to address the ongoing transformation of Christian conceptions of work in late medieval and early modern England.


2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Molly Greene

Abstract Monasteries and the records they produced are a promising source base for writing a history of the mountains of the western Balkans. These mountains are, by and large, absent from accounts of the Ottoman presence in the Balkans and, as with mountainous areas more generally, are often considered to exist outside of the main historical narrative. Using the example of a monastery that was founded in the Pindus mountains in 1556, I argue that the monastery’s beginnings are best understood within the context of the Ottoman sixteenth century, even as due regard for Byzantine precedent must also be made. In addition, I pay close attention to the monastery’s location, for two reasons. First, this opens up a new set of questions for the history of monasteries during the Ottoman period; to date most studies have focused on taxation, land ownership and the relationship to the central state. Second, the monastery’s location offers a way into the environmental history of these mountains at the Empire’s western edge. This article aspires to extend the nascent field of Ottoman environmental history into mountainous terrain.


This book contains the customary mix of learned chapters and book review chapters which cover a variety of aspects of the history of higher education, focusing in this case on Corpus Christi College in Oxford and Tudor England. Chapters look at topics such as Church, State, and corpus; patronage, performativity, and ideas at Corpus Christi; the English humanist tradition; musical participation in early Tudor education; life in a sixteenth-century college; education during the reign of Henry VIII; Tudor Oxford; and English antiquarianism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martina Häcker

Abstract The use of the word cousin as a term of address for non-relatives in late-medieval and Renaissance English is well documented in letters between monarchs, but weak for other social groups in the standard dictionaries, with one example each in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary. As it is difficult to establish for earlier periods whether people were blood relations, an investigation of cousin as a term of address needs to establish the relationship between addressor and addressee, as far as possible, from independent historical sources. This study is based on the use of the term cousin in letters, as this often provides precise information on the relationships of correspondents. This investigation documents the use of cousin from the thirteenth to the early-sixteenth century in all literate ranks of society and concludes that the royal use of cousin constitutes a relic of an earlier more widespread use.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-362
Author(s):  
Yue Chen

Although claimed as a nation-state, with a government, a territory, and citizenry, Manchukuo (1932–1945) is a colony of the Empire of Japan, appropriated from Northeast China. As such, Manchukuo’s literary identity complicates the relationship between nationalism and literature, inviting us to rethink the history of Chinese literature in specific and East Asian literary history in general. This article tackles the thorny problem of Manchukuo literary formation by going through Shuimei Shih’s concept of sinophone and Chen Pingyuan’s notion of the multiethnic, only to conclude via a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s elaboration of Kafka that Manchukuo’s corpus is best approached as a minor literature of its own. The very colonial and local complexity of Manchukuo’s minor literature lies in its multiethnicity and multilingualism. A close reading of Mei’niang, Yokoda Fumiko, and Arsenii Nesmelov, through their deterritorialized Chinese, Japanese, and Russian stories, demonstrates the range of indigenous and exiled writers in their diverse imagination of Manchukuo’s ambiguous sovereignty.


1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Haigh

Twenty years ago, when Patrick McGrath was writing Papists and Puritans, it made sense to present the history of Tudor Catholicism in terms of early decline and later heroic recovery. Our understanding of the sixteenth century was then dominated by two books, which seemed to demonstrate revolutions in religion and government that breached all continuities in ecclesiastical and political history. In A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation, an increasingly sophisticated laity, discontented with the moral laxity and spiritual torpor of the late medieval clergy, was shown to have accepted with enthusiasm the break with Rome and the new doctrines of Protestantism. Gentlemen, lawyers, merchants and artisans responded to the energetic evangelism of the early reformers, and abandoned medieval obscurantism. Secular and ecclesiastical politicians espoused reform for their own calculations of expediency or experience of spirituality, and threw the weight of the state behind the new doctrines, while conservatives lacked the commitment and imagination to resist change.


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