Women's clothes and female honour in early modern London

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIM REINKE-WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
The Right

ABSTRACTThis article explores how the reputations and agency of middling and plebeian women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London were affected by what they wore. Compared with provincial England, markets for women's clothes in the capital were more diverse and accessible. Ambiguous moral judgments were made of women based on their dress, but many sought to acquire good, fashionable attire as the right clothes would improve their options in terms of courtship, sociability and employment, as well as facilitating their ability to negotiate the metropolitan environment and providing them with a ready store of capital. Clothes were thus contested commodities which helped define the limits of the possible for women in early modern London.

Cultures of collecting

2021 ◽  
pp. 138-164
Author(s):  
David Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Book Collecting ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Material Evidence

Studies of private libraries and their owners invariably talk about ‘book collecting’—is this the right terminology? After summarizing our broadly held understanding of the evolution of bibliophile collecting from the eighteenth century onwards, this chapter considers the extent to which similar behaviours can be detected (or not) in the seventeenth, drawing on the material evidence of bookbindings, wording in wills, and other sources. Do we find subject-based collecting, of the kind we are familiar with today, as a characteristic of early modern book owners? Some distinctions are recognized in ways in which medieval manuscripts (as opposed to printed books) were brought together at this time. The relationship between libraries and museums, and contemporary attitudes to them, is explored. The concluding argument is that ‘collecting’ is a careless word to use in the seventeenth-century context; just as we should talk about users rather than readers, we should use ‘owners’ rather than ‘collectors’ as the default term, unless there is evidence to the contrary.

"FREELY ELECTED IN FEAR": PRINCELY ELECTIONS AND POLITICAL POWER IN EARLY MODERN TRANSYLVANIA

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Murdock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Sufficient Power ◽  
The Right ◽  
Broad Consensus

AbstractTransylvania's survival was threatened by both its Habsburg and Ottoman neighbors. Given this precarious international position, ruling princes required sufficient power to govern effectively, and also needed to maintain a broad consensus for their right to exercise authority over the diverse political elite. A successful balance of power between princes and the estates was built around the freedoms granted to a number of different churches, and around the right of the diet to elect princes. This article examines the elections of Gábor Bethlen and other Calvinist princes in Transylvania during the early seventeenth century. Even though these elections were rarely free or fair, they provided a key basis for the growing political authority of princes who were widely identified as divinely-appointed rulers. Transylvania thus provides a model of a competence for elective monarchy, a form of political organization often thought to lead inevitably to unstable and ineffective government.

Architecture, Anatomy, and the New Science in Early Modern London

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Modern London

Focuses on an important but overlooked building in late seventeenth-century London: the College of Physicians on Warwick Lane designed by the scientist and architect Robert Hooke in the 1670s. The building, which was commissioned in response to the previous college’s destruction in the Great Fire of London in 1666, was itself demolished in the nineteenth century. In this article, Matthew Walker argues that the conception and design of Hooke’s college had close links with the early Royal Society and its broader experimental philosophical program. This came about through the agency of Hooke—the society’s curator—as well as the prominence of the college’s physicians in the experimental philosophical group in its early years. By analyzing Hooke’s design for the college, and its prominent anatomy theater in particular, this article thus raises broader questions about architecture’s relationship with medicine and experimental science in early modern London.

scholarly journals The Swift and Secret Messenger: John Wilkins’s Mercury and the Paradoxes of Language

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-91
Author(s):  
Klaudia Łączyńska
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Crisis Of Representation ◽  
The Right

AbstractJohn Wilkins’s Mercury or the Secret and Swift Messenger: Showing How a Man May with Privacy and Speed Communicate His Thoughts to a Friend at Any Distance was first published in 1641. As a book on cryptography presenting a variety of secret means of communication at a distance it seems to have appeared at just the right time, when the biblical curse of the confusion of tongues was doubled by the curse of political confusion on the brink of the English civil war. However, the book seems to be more than just a detailed account of methods of secret writing; its topic gives the author a chance to present his views on language which he would later develop in his life’s work An Essay towards Real Character and a Philosophical Language published in 1668. The Essay had received much greater critical attention than the early pamphlet, which is usually referred to as merely a prelude to an account of his universal language project. Indeed, in the little book on cryptography, Wilkins already demonstrated his awareness of the conventional character of language and its role within the system of human interactions, as well as advertised a project of philosophical language that would enhance communication between all nations and remedy the curse of Babel. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the value of the pamphlet lies also in the insight that it gives into the seventeenth-century debates on the nature of language and into arguments which were often provided, in equal measure, by theology, Hermetic lore, mythology, literature and early modern science. Wilkins’s meticulous recording of the contradictory views and propositions on language produces a sense of methodological inconsistency that leads to ambiguities and paradoxes. However, in the medley of concepts and the collection of linguistic “curiosities” that Mercury presents, a careful reader will discern the growing mistrust of language as a means of representing reality and as a foundation of knowledge, which was one of the symptoms of the general crisis of representation leading to an epistemological shift that started in the seventeenth century.

The Paper Parish: The parish register and the reformation of parish memory in early modern London

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Communal Memory ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
Changing Practices ◽  
Parish Registers

This essay explores the development of parish record-keeping in early modern London, examining the implications of changing practices for communal memory. Building on the study of more than 50 parish registers, it investigates who wrote the parish records, how they were kept and how they were used. Many of the extant records are the product of a ‘memorial moment’ at the turn of the seventeenth century, involving a concerted attempt to re-order and re-present parish papers as memorial objects: the material representations of parish memory. These registers highlight the emergence of an ongoing communal investment in and oversight of record-keeping practices, while the evidence of annotations and corrections in parish registers demonstrates the persistence of oral forms of communal memory, contesting the textual record. The development of the parish register in the period thus emerges as a key site for renegotiating the forms and habits of parish memory.

“Saucy Stink”: Smells, Sanitation, and Conflict in Early Modern London

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-86
Author(s):  
Alexandra Logue
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Waste Management ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Demographic Changes ◽  
Urban Rivers ◽  
Kitchen Waste ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
The City ◽  
Seasonal Weather

This article examines olfactory offenses in early modern London. It explores how inhabitants managed causes of malodorous air, focusing on common nuisances stemming from everyday household practices like laundry and waste management. Clotheslines were hung up between lodgings, households disposed of kitchen waste in gutters overflowing with garbage, and neighbours used stinking, communal privies. Seasonal weather intensified the city’s poor air quality, and rainwater washed refuse into urban rivers. In the early seventeenth century, the growing awareness of the effects of air quality on health coincided with significant demographic changes in the city. Insalubrious air was intrinsically linked to increased migration, overcrowded neighbourhoods, and the spread of diseases. The improvement of the city’s air quality became a more immediate concern for Londoners, civic authorities, and the early Stuart monarchs, who deployed a range of sanitation strategies. As London grew, so too did concern for its inhabitants and the dwellings they occupied.

Theatrical cultures in early modern London

Urban History ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Boulton
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Early Modern London

London's cultural and social life is the focus of four recent books which, with the exception of a few forays by Manley, concentrate mostly on the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century.

“Ye Lovers of Physick, come lend me your Ear”: Dangerous Doctors in Early Modern London

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jillian Linster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Title Page ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
Thomas Browne ◽  
Textual Records

The highly recognizable title-page illustration from Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus was also used in the printing of a ballad to commemorate the death of “Doctor” John Lambe in 1628. This paper explores rhetorical, historical, visual, and bibliographic connections between the two works as well as the cultural significance of their relationship and the stories they tell, which are fraught with warnings regarding the inherent dangers of magic practiced by purported healers. The correspondence of the ballad and the play highlights challenges and changes in the medical marketplace of early modern London, demonstrating the complexity and consequence of the connections among historical events, textual records, and fictional literary representations. Finally, comparing the shared woodcut with an engraved frontispiece from a book written by a more reputable physician, Sir Thomas Browne, traces the rise of more trustworthy medical practitioners in mid-seventeenth-century England.

Reading, Writing, and Initialing: Female Literacy in Early Modern London

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Hubbard
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Reading Literacy ◽  
Elementary Reading ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
Vexed Question ◽  
Female Literacy

AbstractThis article reopens the vexed question of how many women in early modern England could read by calling attention to the precise ways in which women marked, initialed, and signed legal depositions in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London. It shows that initialing and signing were closely correlated skills, and it argues that women who wrote their initials had begun to learn how to read. Using initials as a proxy for elementary reading literacy, it goes on to map female literacy in early modern London, showing that urban upbringings fostered female literacy and that reading literacy was far more broadly socially diffused than the ability to write. Changes in initialing patterns as women aged suggest that women found reading to be useful and relevant to their lives, and that literacy carried social prestige.

APPLYING THE RIGHT MEASURE: ARCHITECTURE AND PHILOLOGY IN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP IN THE DUTCH EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-985 ◽  
Author(s):  
JETZE TOUBER
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Architectural Theory ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Proper Method ◽  
Skilled Professional ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do So

AbstractThe article reconstructs the seventeenth-century Dutch debate about the proper method to reconstruct the biblical temples of Jerusalem. It examines the involvement of Willem Goeree (1635–1711), an expert in architectural theory, in this debate which was dominated by philologically trained scholars. The article suggests that the clash between professional exegetes and a lay theologian like Goeree allows us to see hermeneutical debates of the early Enlightenment in a new light. While the skilled professional aspired to make arcane Temple scholarship accessible to a wider lay audience, theologians denied him the competence to do so, insisting on the primacy of sacred philology in interpreting the Bible. This case thus moves outside of the dogma vs reason dichotomy which dominates historiography concerning early modern biblical interpretation.

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