The Scriptures in Hungarian in Early Modernity

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-331
Author(s):  
Béla Mester
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of

This paper offers an overview of the Hungarian translations of the Scriptures, printed in the sixteenth century. Both the translation of the Bible and print culture date from the fifteenth century in Hungary, but printing in Hungarian is a phenomenon of the sixteenth century. Before then, Scriptural chapters, translated by Hungarian Hussites and Minorite monks remained in manuscript, and the print of the Renaissance royal court served the needs of the humanist Latin literature. First, this paper will describe the development of the principles of translations from the cautious solutions of the Erasmian contributor of the first book printed in Hungarian, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Kraków, 1535), to the conceptions of the well-organized Calvinist group of scholars that edited the first complete Hungarian Bible (1590). In the analysis of the terminology this paper will focus on the expressions of the divine and earthly power, in the context of the history of political ideas of the same epoch. The history of the early printed Scriptures in Hungarian runs parallel to the gradual enlargement of the earthly power in early modern Hungarian political thought, under the conditions of the Turkish occupation, Hapsburg Catholicism, and the special status of Transylvania. In the history of religion, the dominant strain of the Hungarian Reformation turned from Luther to Calvin, with the most important Hungarian publishing house at the time being that of the Unitarians in Transylvania. This change greatly influenced the development of the Hungarian theoretical culture. For instance, the main destination of peregrinatio academica of Hungarians turned from Wittenberg to the universities of the Netherlands, and the Hungarian printers finally opted for the Humanist Antiqua instead of the German Frakturschrift. The second part of the paper will illustrate this process with examples of the typography of the sixteenth-century Hungarian Scriptures, and of their target audiences.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.

scholarly journals “Turkish” Textiles in South-Eastern and East-Central Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Evidence of Transylvanian Customs Accounts

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Mária Pakucs-Willcocks
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Serial Data

Abstract This paper analyzes data from customs accounts in Transylvania from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth on traffic in textiles and textile products from the Ottoman Empire. Cotton was known and commercialized in Transylvania from the fifteenth century; serial data will show that traffic in Ottoman cotton and silk textiles as well as in textile objects such as carpets grew considerably during the second half of the seventeenth century. Customs registers from that period also indicate that Poland and Hungary were destinations for Ottoman imports, but Transylvania was a consumer’s market for cotton textiles.

Taḥqīq vs. Taqlīd in the Renaissances of Western Early Modernity

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 193-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
South India ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Renaissance ◽  
New Framework

Abstract This essay reviews a major new study of European Renaissance Arabist-humanist philology as it was actually practiced, humanist neoclassicizing anti-Arabism notwithstanding. While definitive and philologically magisterial, that study nevertheless falls prey structurally and conceptually to the very eurocentrism whose ideological-textual genesis it chronicles. Situating it within the comparative global early modern philologies framework that has now been proposed in the volume World Philology and the present journal is a necessary remedy—but only a partial one; for that framework too still obscures the multiplicity of specifically genetically Western early modernities, thus hobbling comparative history of philology. I therefore propose a new framework appropriate to the study of Greco-Arabo-Persian and Greco-Arabo-Latin as the two parallel and equally powerful philosophical-philological trajectories that together defined early modern Western—i.e., Hellenic-Abrahamic, Islamo-Judeo-Christian, west of South India—intellectual history: taḥqīq vs. taqlīd, progressivism vs. declinism. But a broadened and more balanced analytical framework alone cannot save philology, much less Western civilization, from the throes of its current existential crisis: for we philologists of the Euro-American academy are fevered too by the cosmological ill that is reflexive scientistic materialism. As antidote, I prescribe a progressivist, postmodern return to early modern Western deconstructive-reconstructive cosmic philology as prerequisite for the discipline’s survival, and perhaps even triumph, in the teeth of totalitarian colonialist-capitalist modernity.

Coda

2019 ◽  
pp. 225-228
Author(s):  
David Hershinow
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Truth Teller

In this book, I have tried to show that it is only with the rise of dramatic realism that the figure of the Cynic truth-teller begins to provoke sustained interpretive crisis, a crisis that takes shape in the sixteenth century and that goes on to drive key developments in our literary, philosophical and political history. Through my readings of Shakespeare’s plays, I have also tried to show that literature – along with its academic offspring, literary criticism – is uniquely positioned to diagnose the interpretive errors that consequently underwrite philosophical and political ideas about the means of achieving extreme critical agency. What these two overarching aims have in common is the critical methodology I develop in order to advance them, and I conclude this book by briefly commenting on the value this method holds for early modern studies in particular and for the discipline of literary studies in general....

Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Legal History in Calvin’s Mosaic Harmony

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-195
Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Relationship

The chapter examines John Calvin’s commentary on Exodus through Deuteronomy (1563) through the lens of sixteenth-century historical jurisprudence, exemplified in the works of Calvin’s contemporaries François de Connan and François Baudouin. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how Calvin’s historicizing exegesis is in continuity with broader contemporary trends in premodern Christian biblical interpretation; this chapter explores another essential context for Calvin’s approach to the Bible. The intermingling of narrative and legal material in these four biblical books inspired Calvin to break with his customary practice of lectio continua and apply his historical hermeneutic more broadly and creatively to explain the Mosaic histories and legislation. Calvin’s unusual and unprecedented arrangement of the material in this commentary and his attention to the relationship between law and history reveal his engagement with his generation’s quest for historical method.

The Catholic Recusancy of the Yorkshire Fairfaxes. Part I.

1956 ◽  
Vol 3 (02) ◽  
pp. 68-114
Author(s):  
Hugh Aveling
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Personal Choice ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Landed Gentry

In the middle ages the Fairfaxes ranked amongst the minor landed gentry of Yorkshire. They seem to have risen to this status in the thirteenth century, partly by buying land out of the profits of trade in York, partly by successful marriages. But they remained of little importance until the later fifteenth century. They had, by then, produced no more than a series of bailiffs of York, a treasurer of York Minster and one knight of the shire. The head of the family was not normally a knight. The family property consisted of the two manors of Walton and Acaster Malbis and house property in York. But in the later fifteenth century and onwards the fortunes of the family were in the ascendant and they began a process of quite conscious social climbing. At the same time they began to increase considerably in numbers. The three main branches, with al1 their cadet lines, were fixed by the middle of the sixteenth century – the senior branch, Fairfax of Walton and Gilling, the second branch, Fairfax of Denton, Nunappleton, Bilhorough and Newton Kyme, the third branch, Fairfax of Steeton. It is very important for any attempt to assess the strength and nature of Catholicism in Yorkshire to try to understand the strong family – almost clan – unity of these pushing, rising families. While adherence to Catholicism could be primarily a personal choice in the face of family ties and property interests, the history of the Faith in Yorkshire was conditioned greatly at every point by the strength of those ties and interests. The minute genealogy and economic history of the gentry has therefore a very direct bearing on recusant history.

Scorning the Image of Virtue

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia J. McKee
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Theater Studies ◽  
Reformation Theology ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Stage

There survives an extraordinary letter of 1616 by the prominent English stage player, Nathan Field. His missive is one of the only extant apologies for the theater written by a player. Field’s letter is a response to a sermon preached by Thomas Sutton, and it richly characterizes Field’s relationship to his parish and to the larger ecclesial powers. This discussion shows how Field ironically employs the very charges often levied by opponents of theater—deception, emotional indulgence, and idolatry—to indict Sutton for a public attack he wielded against Field from the Sunday pulpit. Field’s apology is read within the context of the era’s antitheatricalist polemics, Jacobean politics, Reformation theology, and Field’s history as the son of a radical puritan preacher. The letter invites deep consideration of church and theater—preaching and playing—as competing kinds of performance. Field’s apology also focuses attention on a neglected area in theater studies—the history of players and playing in early modernity. What was an actor’s idea of himself at a time when his profession was redefined by religious reforms? Further, this discussion offers preliminary suggestions for an early modern aesthetics of performance by inviting a dialogue between the era’s extreme antitheatricalism and concurrent prescriptions for effective oratory.

Philip ii of Spain and His Italian Jewish Spy

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 318-342
Author(s):  
Flora Cassen
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Information Networks ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Secret Information ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jewish Families

A bitter conflict between the Spanish and Ottoman empires dominated the second half of the sixteenth century. In this early modern “global” conflict, intelligence played a key role. The Duchy of Milan, home to Simon Sacerdoti (c.1540-1600), a Jew, had fallen to Spain. The fate that usually awaited Jews living on Spanish lands was expulsion—and there were signs to suggest that King Philip ii (1527-1598) might travel down that road. Sacerdoti, the scion of one of Milan’s wealthiest and best-connected Jewish families had access to secret information through various contacts in Italy and North-Africa. Such intelligence was highly valuable to Spanish forces, and Philip ii was personally interested in it. However, this required Sacerdoti to serve an empire—Spain—with a long history of harming the Jews, and to spy on the Ottomans, widely considered as the Jews’ supporters at the time. This article offers a reflection on Simon Sacerdoti’s story. Examining how a Jew became part of the Spanish intelligence agency helps us understand how early modern secret information networks functioned and sheds new light on questions of Jewish identity in a time of uprootedness and competing loyalties.

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