“He Creditted More the Printed Booke”: Common Lawyers' Receptivity to Print, c.1550–1640

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Williams
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Common ◽  
Textual Material ◽  
Legal Arguments ◽  
Common Learning

The printing press was recognized by early modern commentators, just as it has been by historians, as an important invention that had profound effects on the arts and sciences. Legal historians have not missed the potentially transformative effects of printing—not only might lawyers found heterodox arguments upon the precise words of printed texts, rather than relying upon the “common learning,” but the absence of texts from the “common learning” in the printed canon meant legal historians themselves labored for many years under a misapprehension as to the nature of medieval English law. However, little work has been undertaken on the precise impact of printing upon the English legal profession, particularly in the shorter term. Common lawyers, particularly in the sixteenth century, were a group who increasingly relied upon, and cited, textual material as the foundation of their arguments on all points of law. Over the course of the sixteenth century, lawyers came increasingly to rely upon prior cases, and particularly prior judged cases, as the basis of legal arguments and of the correctness of those arguments. Advocates and judges were all faced with a large, and still growing, body of manuscript material, and a sizeable collection of printed works. Attitudes towards printed material is an important topic for historians of early modern law for suggesting which sources of legal ideas were given more prominence in the period.

Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. ix, 437. $27.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 250-251
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The Marxists had it right all along, they just got tripped up by their materialism. Early modern capitalism opened vast new worlds, particularly in the arts and sciences, only the traffic went both ways. Creative agents invented new markets and pushed commerce in directions that favored enterprises immensely cosmopolitan and innovative, often solely for the sake of beauty and display. Commerce offered a context but the nobility, and not an imagined bourgeoisie, had the edge when it came to exploiting the market for objets. Paintings could be traded for property, land, and houses. Princes could sponsor natural philosophers, and the fluidity in values meant that good investors, like good practitioners of the arts and sciences, took an interest in all aspects of learning. The interrelatedness of the representational arts and natural philosophy stands as one of the central themes in this tightly integrated collection of essays. We now have a vast historiography telling us that we should no longer teach early modern science without reference to the art of the time, and vice-versa. The point is beautifully illustrated by an exhibition recently held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (spring 2002) on the art of Pieter Saenredam. Working in Utrecht in the 1630s, he used geometry to regularize and make precise the angles and corners found in the exquisite paintings he made of the city's churches. He knew as much about geometry as he did about chiaroscuro. At precisely the same moment, an hour or two away by barge, Descartes in Leiden put the final touches on his Discourse on Method (1637). In effect he explained to the world why precision and clarity of thought made possible the kind of beauty that Saenredam's paintings would come to embody.

Cardano, Girolamo (1501–76)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eckhard Kessler
Keyword(s):  
Functional Analysis ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Medical Paradigm ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Almost All

The Renaissance Italian Girolamo Cardano is famous for his colourful personality, as well as for his work in medicine and mathematics, and indeed in almost all the arts and sciences. He was an eclectic philosopher, and one of the founders of the so-called new philosophy of nature developed in the sixteenth century. He used both the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic traditions as starting points, and following the medical paradigm of organic being, he transformed the traditional Aristotelian universe into an animated universe in which, thanks to their organic functional order, all individual parts strive towards the conservation both of themselves and of the whole universe. As a result, they can be subjected to a functional analysis. In his more casual writings on moral philosophy, Cardano showed his orientation to be basically Stoic.

Translation and Cultural Convergence in Late Sixteenth-century Scotland and Huguenot France

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Peter Auger
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Cultural Convergence ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
Early Modern Poetry ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common

Examining poetical exchanges between James VI of Scotland and the Huguenot courtier Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas in the 1580s, Chapter 7 demonstrates how poetry contributed to diplomatic initiatives, and how diplomatic concerns fostered expressiveness in the composition and presentation of poems. Early modern poetry, especially poetry in translation, could contribute to building better international cultural relations. Ambassadors and elite political figures were sometimes involved in such poems as writers, translators, readers, dedicatees, or recipients. When they were, these poems could contain subtle gestures consistent with the cultural diplomatic aims to express shared identity and strengthen political ties. The poetic exchanges between James and Du Bartas in the 1580s contained many signals of the common literary and political culture in Scotland and Protestant France, signals that are found in the subject matter, prosody, diction, structure, and other poetic features of the verses that they exchanged. This chapter examines the poetic techniques that James and Du Bartas used for expressing cultural convergence between Scotland and France when translating and composing original verse for each other, and then shows how the print publication of their poems enabled a broader international community to participate in this cultural moment.

Maintaining the Common Peace: Security and the Religious Peace of 1578 during the Dutch Revolt

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-250
Author(s):  
Erik Swart
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Dutch Revolt ◽  
The Common ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Religious War

Abstract This article analyses the failed Dutch Religious Peace of 1578 through the lens of security. As Wayne te Brake recently argued in Religious War and Religious Peace in Early Modern Europe, creating security for all parties is key for an effective religious peace. In the sixteenth century, communal security was deemed a collective responsibility. In practice this meant that religious peace – suppressing and preventing violence and threats between Protestants and Catholics – was framed as a matter of preserving the common peace. Theological questions were dissimulated or kept out of peace settlements. In 1578, the religious peace proposed that Catholics and Calvinists were to live in the Netherlands side by side, each allowed to worship publicly. Some 27 Dutch towns introduced this religious peace. Yet the municipal magistrates mostly did so reluctantly and generally declined to share political power, thus contributing to its failure. Moreover, there were different, conflicting conceptions at work concerning the common peace, as well as regarding how to keep it.

How Information Spread Among the Gentry, 1550-1640

1982 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. J. Levy
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Good Knowledge ◽  
Grammar School ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Information Spread ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Courts

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the English gentry came to realize that its continued access to the controls of power would depend less on birth and military prowess and more on literacy and learning. As a result, the sons of gentlemen flooded into the grammar schools, where they acquired a good knowledge of classical Latin and, rather less commonly, the rudiments of Greek. Together with the languages of the ancients, the schoolboys imbibed at least something of classical ideals. Principally they learned the duty of service to the common weal, a service to be expressed politically. That ideal had permeated Roman education and, through the writings of humanist educational theorists such as Erasmus, was embodied in the curricula of the English grammar schools and universities. Young men were trained in the arts of argument. They learned the trick of compiling a commonplace book, under whose artfully devised headings they entered the “flowers” of their reading. Then, when occasion demanded it, in conversation or letter, in the law courts or parliament, they could search out the appropriate topos, in their memories or in their notes, and bring to bear the weight of classical (and even modern) wisdom. So much, indeed, might be learned by all grammar school boys. Those who proceeded to the universities added further weapons to their armories. Since the universities existed principally to train theologians and preachers, a function whose importance increased as it became necessary to defend English Protestantism from the attacks of Catholics and separatists, they emphasized dialectic.

scholarly journals The Pastoral Use of the Book of Revelation in Late Tudor England

2006 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-710 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRICK J. O'BANION
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Common

Over the past forty years historians have demonstrated continued interest in tracing the development of radical early modern English apocalypticism. The Tudor and Stuart eschatological scene, however, encompassed more than just millenarian activism. This article emphasises the pastoral ends to which Revelation was used by a group of late sixteenth-century writers as they sought to make it accessible to the ‘common sort’ of Christian. Viewing interest in the Last Days through this pastoral lens highlights both the tense complexities present in the Elizabethan Church and the usefulness of eschatological themes in studying ordinary and normative aspects of religious experience.

Perceptions of Nature in Early Modern Portuguese India

Itinerario ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Halikowski Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Forms Of Life

Portuguese perceptions of nature in the new worlds they encountered in Southeast Asia from the turn of the sixteenth century were a complex amalgam of inherited frameworks and the forging of a new gaze or vision. Grand claims that the Portuguese discoveries amount to the “construction of space” and the “invention of humanity” have been trumpeted, but are too overblown. From another perspective, Portuguese scholars have recently engaged in a philosophical debate around experiencialismo—the distinction between “scientific experience” and the supposedly pre- or non-scientific “lived” experience of the senses (experiência vivencial), suggesting that the Portuguese Discoveries fall at a critical juncture between these two hermeneutic paradigms. But what did this amount to in concrete terms?I would prefer to turn to other scholars like the Belgian historian Albert Deman, who has stipulated that the perception of Indian nature in the European imaginary, was locked in three unchanging tropes that even first-hand experience could not easily undo. These tropes were exuberance, superabundance and luxury, and go right back to the first encounters between East and West in antiquity, notably Alexander the Great's adventures of the fourth century B.C., which impressed upon Westerners the East's “superior forms of life” and what Pliny, for example, dutifully acknowledged as “the wonder of the victorious expedition of Alexander the Great, when that part of the world was first revealed.” Why wonder, and what does Deman allude to when he writes of “superior forms of life”? The common impression was that everything grew more forcefully, and in greater profusion in the East. There were, for example, two flowerings a year of some plants; the colours and tastes were stronger; the smells were beguiling. What the Portuguese noted as “the fumos da India” merely drew on biblical reference in the Book of Proverbs to the “spicy breezes of the East”. From these basic conceptions had sprung compilations of all the fabulous stories of the East, texts such as those produced by Ktesias the Knidian and Megasthenes whose ideas were passed down through Pliny into the genre of the marvellous, or mirabilia, fanciful speculations and fables developed along the lines of half-truths reported by returning merchants and travellers, and sometimes fictions spread by Arab middlemen keen to retain their long-standing monopoly of purveyance to Christian consumers.

Narratives and Machines in Enlightenment Britain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Drury
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Development ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Scientific Principles ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The affinity between narratives and machines in the eighteenth century reflects the early modern effort to break down the traditional barriers separating the arts and sciences. Leading practitioners sought to establish the foundation of their arts in the sciences and natural philosophers transformed the sciences by incorporating the machines and techniques of artisans. Inspired by these developments, neoclassical critics sought to identify the fundamental mechanics of narrative. Like the machines used in other arts, the novel was understood to be a technical ‘invention’, recently imported from Europe, which needed to be rationalized for an enlightened nation. Once established on scientific principles, the novel could become a simulation device that produced useful knowledge of the principles underlying human behaviour. From these circumstances emerged one of the dominant technical codes of eighteenth-century fiction, a narrative of progress that extended the practical goals of the Industrial Enlightenment into the realm of individual moral development.

Loyola's Bees

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Didactic Poetry ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This is the first dedicated study of the classical-style, Latin didactic poetry produced by the Society of Jesus in the early modern period. The Jesuits were the most prolific composers of such poetry, teaching all manner of arts and sciences: meteorology and magnetism, raising chickens and children, the arts of sculpture and engraving, writing and conversation, the social and medicinal benefits of coffee and chocolate, the pious life and the urbane life. The book accounts for this investment in so secular a genre by considering the Society's educational and ideological values and practices. Extensive quotation from the poems reveals their literary qualities, compositional methods, and traditions. The poems also command scholarly attention for what they reveal about social, cultural, and intellectual life in this period.

Sixteenth-Century Jewish Makers of Printed Books and the Shaping of Late Renaissance Jewish Literacy

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-68
Author(s):  
Pavel Sládek
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter looks at the medium of printed books that was introduced into Jewish culture soon after its emergence in the mid-fifteenth century. It discusses the arrival of the presses that were run by different members of the Jewish Soncino family in Italy and elsewhere at the beginning of the 1480s, wherein a wide variety of genres appeared in print. It also describes the Soncino editions that were distinguished among printers by the accuracy and beauty of their typefaces. The chapter mentions the early printed book that was seen as a radical innovation in the age of complex cultural transformations both within and outside Jewish society. It recounts how the 'knowledge explosion' that was spurred by the rise of the printing press was a key factor in the formation of early modern Jewish cultural history.

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