‘Have you the tongues?’

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-133
Author(s):  
Liz Oakley-Brown
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
Mind Set

This essay suggests that, as plays produced in the wake of Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the Protestant Reformation, two early Shakespearean comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1590–91) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1594–95), engage with multilingualism’s and translation’s impact on early modern English identities in striking ways. While these late-sixteenth-century texts are products of a cultural mind-set grappling with the vicissitudes of Englishness via the dramatization of deftly layered social strata and linguistic differences, ultimately, I argue that they simultaneously anticipate cultural accord. — Keywords: Shakespearean comedy; the Reformation; identity politics in Elizabethan England; social exclusion; friendship We only ever speak one language […] — (yes, but) — We never speak only one language… (Jacques Derrida 1998: 10)

THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE CULTURE OF HUMANISTS AND THE COMMUNICATIVE ORIGINS OF THE REFORMATION

Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 375-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORGE LEDO
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.

The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Renaissance Italy

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
The One

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.

The Impact of the Reformation

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Martin Pugh
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Long Term Effect ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
European Diplomacy ◽  
Francis I

This chapter focuses on the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Following Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1531, the English Reformation led Britain into a protracted struggle with the two great Catholic powers, Spain and France, for the next 300 years. The long-term effect was to define Britain as the leading Protestant power; but more immediately, it posed a far greater threat to England than Islam, and effectively destroyed the rationale for crusading activities. In this situation, the Islamic empires actually became a valuable balancing factor in European diplomacy. Henry's readiness to deal with the Muslim powers was far from eccentric during the sixteenth century. Both King Francis I of France and Queen Elizabeth I of England took the policy of collaboration much further.

REBELLION, RESISTANCE, AND A SWISS BRUTUS?

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDRIES RAATH ◽  
SHAUN DE FREITAS
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Divine Justice

Early sixteenth-century Germany and Switzerland witnessed, amongst their peasants, a growing dissatisfaction with economic exploitation and the increasing power of political rulers. The Protestant Reformation at the time had a profound influence on the moulding of this dissatisfaction into a right to demand the enforcement of divine justice. The Swiss reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, provided parallels for the demands of the peasants, while the German reformers, Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, criticized the rebellious methods of the peasantry. Against this background the young Swiss reformer, Heinrich Bullinger, responded more positively towards the claims of the peasants by opposing the views of the Lutheran reformers in his play ‘Lucretia and Brutus’. In this drama, Bullinger propounds the first steps towards the development of his federal theory of politics by advancing the idea of oath-taking as the mechanism for transforming the monarchy into a Christian republic. The idea of oath-taking was destined to become a most important device in early modern politics, used to combat tyranny and to promote the idea of republicanism.

Jacob Tengstrom, First Archbishop of Finland

1975 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-351
Author(s):  
Toivo Harjunpaa
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Church Of Sweden ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church

The Reformation of the sixteenth century dealt a heavy blow to the historic episcopal government of the church. Only two of the national churches which embraced the Protestant Reformation succeeded in retaining their old primatical sees and episcopal polity: the Church of England and the Church of Sweden-Finland. For centuries before the Reformation, the Finnish church had been ecclesiastically part of the province of Uppsala (an archbishopric since 1164) just as Finland itself was politically part of the Kingdom of Sweden. Thus there was no need to establish a Finnish archdiocese while union with Sweden continued. But with Napoleon's concurrence (the Tilsit pact of 1807), the Russians invaded Finland in 1808 and met with such success that all Finland was ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1809.

European Calvinism: history, providence, and martyrdom

1997 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Andrew Pettegree
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
Mind Set ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Church

For students of the Reformation one of the main conceptual problems is undoubtedly the distance between the mind-set of our age and theirs. We look at the Reformation as a new beginning, the moment when the Church fragmented into competing Churches, and one of the fundamental developments of the Early Modern Age: a term which in itself presents a view of progress and change as one of the determining characteristics of the age.Contemporaries, however, had a very different perception; they saw the movement for evangelical reform as one of renovation and renewal. They believed that they were attempting to recover what was best in the past of the Church, which had since become hopelessly corrupted. With others of their contemporaries they despised innovation. One can surely only understand Martin Luther if one recognizes the depth of his conservatism; that his personal crusade was to a large extent fuelled by a sense of moral outrage and indignation at what the papacy had done to his Church.

A Dowry, Will, and Blended Family of Calvin’s Geneva Put Anne Colladon, to the Test

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeannine Olson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Blended Family ◽  
Financial Problems ◽  
Complex Situation ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
The Reformation

AbstractAnne Colladon, widow of Laurent de Normandie, financier of the mid-sixteenth century Genevan book trade, grappled with Laurent’s first wife’s estate and her adult stepsons’ claims on her estate. This case study of a famous family of French origin reveals complexities of early-modern systems of dowries and wills and problems for a second wife and her daughter. Normandie was a great hero of the Reformation because of his financing of Calvin’s publications and his dispatching of colporteurs carrying Bibles, catechisms, and Psalters into France. Anne was from a prominent family that fled France for Geneva (1550). She was an astute business woman and seemingly responsible mother but she inherited a complex situation after Normandie’s untimely death of the plague in 1569. She was left with financial problems and two stepsons in a blended family that included three children she had conceived with Laurent. It was not an easy mix.

scholarly journals In the Borderlands of Periodization with “The blythnes that hes bein”: The medieval / early modern boundary in Scottish history

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mairi Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Social Discipline ◽  
Scottish History

The conventional placement of the boundary between “medieval” and “early modern” periods in Scottish history has obscured our understanding of certain developments in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland. This paper proposes a reconsideration of periodization so that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries be examined against the backdrop of early modern (rather than medieval) historical scholarship, and not only in the context of Europe but also in the more expansive field of Atlantic history. With such a shift in periodical alignment, several features become more apparent including a change to religious culture in connection with the Catholic Reformation, an increase in social discipline that helped shape the Protestant Reformation, and early participation in the Atlantic slave trade.

scholarly journals “House Fathers” and “People of the Fields” in Art and Folk Literature Since the Reformation

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Scheuerman ◽  
Arthur Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Rural Culture ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Plant Selection ◽  
Agricultural Improvement ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Folk Literature ◽  
Rural Depopulation

Themes related to humanity’s relationship to nature as technological change led to the Industrial Revolution are evident in early modern German and Austrian art and literature. Authors of popular Hausväterliteratur (house fathers’ literature) associated with the Protestant Reformation advocated the rudiments of agricultural “improvement” through division and specialization of agrarian labor, plant selection, crop rotation, and other changes that upper class landowners adopted for their own economic benefit. By the nineteenth century, authors of Volksliteratur and Dorfgeschichten(village stories) composed novels and short stories celebrating aspects of rural culture and land stewardship as both values were increasingly threatened by modernity. In his writings on Die Gute Gesellschaft (The Good Society), Peter Rosegger cautioned against preoccupation with technical progress that was contributing to rural depopulation and erosion of the sustaining Volksgeist (folk spririt) of locale, community, and obligation.

scholarly journals Worlds of Difference

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-149
Author(s):  
Charles E. Butterworth
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Detailed Explanation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Early Modern Times

This is an appealing and clearly written account of how European thinkersfrom late medieval to early modern times reflected upon and explored thequestion of what to do about people of different religions and cultures. Inother words, how should their divergent opinions be understood and, eventually,what practical dispositions should be taken toward them? CaryNederman devotes the introduction and first chapter to an excellent,detailed explanation of the book’s focus and goals. Simply put, he is intentupon challenging two currently dominant views: that toleration emerged inEurope only at the time of the Reformation, and that it is ineluctably linkedwith the kind of political liberalism usually associated with John Locke. Tothis end, he calls the reader’s attention to expressions of religious, and evensomewhat political, toleration that appear early in the twelfth century andcontinue well into the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, he does not succeedin this ambitious, even appealing, stratagem as fully as he would havewished, for he admits in passing that he is content to “offer illustrations,”instead of a “comprehensive account,” of this phenomenon ...

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document